Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 119694 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 598(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 119694 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 598(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
Tasha is a middle school teacher and I don’t know how she does it. I get stressed out just listening to some of the crazy stories she tells about her students and their awful behavior. She has the patience of a saint, I guess—she’s a better woman than I am for sure.
Now that we’re all together in Yelli’s big kitchen, I feel the warm glow of community. In the past five years, these women have become my family. We love and support each other through every crisis.
We were all there to cry with Sophia when her mother died unexpectedly and we supported Naomi through her divorce when her asshole of a husband left with his mistress. He tried to take the house and leave her with nothing but luckily Lucia stepped in and got her divorce lawyer boss involved. He wiped the floor with Naomi’s ex and she got to keep everything as well as getting generous alimony and child support settlements.
The girls supported me when my Grandma—who raised me—first had a stroke and then passed away the day before my birthday. That was a hard year—I know I wouldn’t have made it through without them.
I could go on and on but you get the point. We’re not just a book club—we’re family. And the funny thing is, our book club—the Curvy Girls Smut Club—didn’t even have anything to do with books when it started.
The eight of us met for the first time at a TOPS meeting—that stands for Take Off Pounds Sensibly, in case you’re wondering. It’s kind of like an old-fashioned version of Weight Watchers but a hell of a lot cheaper and without all those three point snack bars that taste like cardboard that the WW counselors are always trying to sell you.
Anyway, the meeting was being held in the activity center of the First Methodist Church over in Seminole Heights—which is kind of a central Tampa location. That’s probably why we all ended up there in the first place, even though we live in different parts of the city. I still remember the first time we met—how we all had to go through the weigh in and then we sat around in a circle in those hard, folding metal chairs that hurt your ass and talked about our “weight loss challenges.”
Only instead of talking about how we ought to exercise more and eat more fruits and vegetables, it kind of turned into a recipe swap. At first people were talking about recipes for veggie soup and “egg roll in a bowl” which is really low calorie if you make it with lean ground chicken breast and lots of cabbage.
Then the woman who was running the meeting had to take a phone call. When she stepped out, things got real.
“You know what I love to make—lasagna,” Naomi confessed. “I mean, it’s not diet—my Nona’s recipe calls for homemade noodles and all the cheese—but it’s amazing.”
“Oh, you have a family recipe? I want that!” Sophia exclaimed. “I mean, if you don’t mind sharing. I have a really good recipe for smothered pork chops,” she added.
Before we knew it, we were all trading family recipes. Tasha told us about her grandpa’s technique for the perfect chicken and sausage gumbo and Marisol gave us the marinade for Korean pork ribs—I think they’re called galbi? Anyway they’re delicious—but definitely not diet.
Lucia chimed in with her mother’s best fried yucca and I offered to share my Grandma’s cherry-chocolate dump cake recipe. (It comes out incredibly moist and the secret ingredient is a can of Coke.)
We were all just getting along like a house on fire, as my Southern Grandma would have said. I had never felt such a swift and sudden connection to any group of women in my life—it was like we just clicked.
At that point, the woman who was running the meeting, who was skinny as a string-bean—another Grandma expression—came back in and heard what was going on.
“What’s this I’m hearing?” she demanded, her thin eyebrows drawing down over her bony nose. (Yes, even her eyebrows were skinny.) “Here at TOPS, we encourage recipe sharing with other members, but they must be healthy recipes.”
We all stopped talking abruptly and Hanna—who had been just about to tell us the secret to making really amazing fudge lava cake—turned beet red with embarrassment.
The meeting was almost over by then, so we left—glad to get away from the judgmental meeting coordinator—and gathered on the sidewalk outside the church.
“Well, I guess she told us,” I muttered under my breath as I shot a look at the door we’d just come out of.
“That’s what she gets for leaving a lot of curvy girls together unsupervised,” Lucia said. “Skinny bitch,” she added, which made Sophia and Mari start snickering.
Their laugher was contagious and pretty soon all of us were laughing so hard our sides ached. I was too—I didn’t even know what was so funny—it just felt so right to be in that group. Like we all belonged together somehow.