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CHAPTER 1

Lizzie Glass didn't consider herself a liar. Or at least not a born liar. She hadn't made up stories in kindergarten about how she was secretly a princess in disguise, even though she wanted nothing more than to be just that. As a teenager she never pretended to have smoked pot or made up a fake boyfriend, even when doing so would have saved her a lot of embarrassment. For the most part, any lies she'd told had been crimes of omission. And, okay, yes, some of those omissions had been bigger than others. Some had been pretty massive, actually. Nevertheless, she wasn't in the habit of making declarations she knew were patently false.

And yet here she was: dressed in a toga in the New York Botanical Garden, handing out free samples of "cottziki," and lying.

She'd been hired by Queensridge Dairy to help with their #FitForAQueen campaign to give cottage cheese a face-lift, and she'd spent the past month trucking around New York and New Jersey trying to convince people cottage cheese wasn't merely diet food for old ladies and health nuts. Today was Mother's Day, the final day of the campaign, and Queensridge had arranged for Lizzie to camp out next to the food trucks on Daffodil Hill, hoping to snag some hungry families taking part in the Botanical Garden's annual Mother's Day party.

"Cottziki?" Lizzie offered cheerily, extending a tray of dill-and-cucumber-flecked curds toward a group of passersby.

The truth was, Lizzie hated cottage cheese. Hated it. For someone who cooked for a living, despising a food with such passion was awkward, if not unusual. The sour smell, the lumpy texture ... she always felt as if she were being asked to eat someone else's vomit. Every time she looked at the samples of cottage cheese tzatziki in those little plastic cups, she cringed. She had no idea why she'd taken this job.

That wasn't true. She knew why. It paid, and she needed the money. And as long as someone out there was willing to exploit her former fame, she was happy to cash the check. There had been far fewer of those checks lately, as her television days drifted further into the past. Recently, even her personal chef gigs had started drying up, leaving her with a single client, who was demanding and impossible but who paid on time and in full. And of course there was the monthly column with Savor, but her contract was nearly up, and the magazine had recently appointed a new editor in chief, who'd spawned rumors about a "total magazine makeover."

So it had come to this: pushing a food she couldn't stomach onto strangers, telling them it was healthy and glamorous and they absolutely had to try it.

"Cottziki?" Lizzie repeated as another crowd walked past. This time a mother and her twentysomething daughter slowed their step to survey Lizzie's offerings.

"Cott what?" the mother asked.

"Cottziki. Like tzatziki, but with cottage cheese instead of yogurt."

"Why not just use yogurt?"

Lizzie smiled and trotted out her practiced spiel. "Cottage cheese is an excellent source of protein and vitamin A, and with its unique flavor profile, it takes dishes like tzatziki to the next level!"

"But isn't it loaded with sodium? And those lumps ... ick."

You're right! Lizzie thought. It's gross! But I can't afford my rent anymore, so I'm pretending it's not!

"Give it a try," Lizzie said. "I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."

The mother and daughter eyed each other warily. "Here goes nothing ..." the daughter said.

Lizzie watched as they both reached for a cup and brought the small plastic spoons to their lips. The daughter's expression was unreadable, but the mother looked as if she'd sucked on a lemon.

"Not for me," she said, and tossed the cup into the trash bin.

Lizzie smiled politely and adjusted her toga. Why was she wearing a toga, anyway? The whole costume only seemed to emphasize that what she was serving was emphatically not authentically Greek and that she was trying way too hard.

The mother and daughter began to walk away, when the daughter stopped and turned around. "Hey, didn't you used to be on that show a few years back? Healthy University or something?"

"Healthy U."

"Yeah, that's it. What happened? I never see it on anymore."

"It got canceled. A while ago, actually."

"Oh." She took in Lizzie's costume and the electric-blue Queensridge Dairy food truck behind her. "So is this what you're doing now?"

"Among other things."

"That's ... cool." She tried to sound enthusiastic, but Lizzie knew better. "Good luck to you."

The daughter turned around and joined her mother down the walking path, and Lizzie told herself there was no reason to feel embarrassed, even if, deep down, she knew that was another lie.

*
An hour later, Lizzie had made little progress in her cottziki crusade. Apart from a handful of enthusiastic cottage cheese fans (whose sanity Lizzie couldn't help but question), people generally didn't see why they needed to try a lumpy riff on a Greek dish when they could get the real thing from the Greek food truck fifty feet away.

"This stuff any good?" asked Emilio, the Queensridge truck driver for the day. There seemed to be a different one every time.

"It's okay," Lizzie said. "Not my favorite."

Emilio grabbed a cup and took a bite. "Eh. Not bad. Who made it?"

"Me."

"And you say it's just 'okay'?"

"I'm my own biggest critic."

That was true, but it also killed Lizzie to serve up a dish she could barely recommend. When she'd first taken the job, she pitched recipes that disguised her most hated food in dishes she loved: her grandmother's noodle kugel, lasagna, deep-fried dumplings (because she figured pretty much anything tastes delicious if you dip it in batter and deep-fry it). But the #FitForAQueen campaign manager told Lizzie the point was to showcase the company's product — not to hide it under so many ingredients the customers wouldn't know it was there (which was, indeed, exactly what Lizzie was trying to do). Besides, healthy cuisine was Lizzie's calling card, and things like fried food didn't fit with her image.

So Lizzie came up with a battery of healthy, cottage cheese–centric recipes: herbed cottage cheese dip, cherry-and-oat cottage cheese breakfast parfait, honey-vanilla cottage cheese pudding. She could tolerate those recipes, and she even developed a chocolate–peanut butter "Snickers" protein shake she quite liked (though she was certain it would be better with yogurt). But then as Mother's Day approached, the campaign manager got it in his head that a Greek-themed dish was essential, as if somehow togas and motherhood went hand in hand, and her riff on a Greek classic was born.

Lizzie stared across Daffodil Hill, taking in the bright yellow and white blooms, their fluffy petals fluttering in the warm spring breeze. After a cold April that had felt more like autumn, May had ushered in a spell of warm weather that had awakened all of the flowers and shrubs from their winter slumber. The vibrant fuchsia and white azaleas reminded Lizzie how much she missed her mother's garden in Philadelphia, where her flame-colored azalea bush probably looked as if it were on fire right now.

Instinctively, Lizzie reached for her phone, only to realize she'd left it in the truck because her toga didn't have pockets. There was a momentary lull in foot traffic, so Lizzie took the opportunity to rest for a few minutes in the front seat of the truck, where she'd left her phone on the dashboard.

She had a missed call and message from her mom. Lizzie had tried her earlier in the morning to wish her a happy Mother's Day, but the call had gone straight to voice mail. She'd assumed her mom was still sleeping, but part of her worried, like she always did, that something was wrong. A few years ago, a friend had told Lizzie about his former neighbor, who died when she choked on a piece of chicken in her kitchen. The woman was divorced and lived alone, and all Lizzie could think was how easily that could happen to her own mother.

Lizzie listened to her mom's message while she sat in the passenger seat, playing with a chestnut strand of hair that had come loose from her faux Greek updo.

"Hi, sweetie, it's Mom." Lizzie smiled at the sound of her mother's voice. It had a gravelly quality, with a slight New York accent that betrayed the nearly four decades she'd lived in Philadelphia. "Sorry I missed your call earlier — if you can believe it, I only just woke up! But give me a ring when you get this. You said you might be able to take a late train to Philly? I know better than to get my hopes up, but ... it would be great to see you. Anyway, hope your event is going well. Cottage cheese? Are pigs flying?"

Lizzie grinned.

"Hey, traffic's picking up again," Emilio called. "You should probably get back out here."

"One sec'," Lizzie called back as she quickly scrolled through her in-box. She scanned through the usual junk — sales at Williams Sonoma and the Gap, recipes from various food sites — but her smile tightened when she reached an e-mail from Jonah Sun, her editor at Savor:

Hey, Lizzie,

Thanks for the latest column. Looks great. Can't wait to try those baked apples.

This is probably a good time to tell you that as much as I've really loved working with you the past few years, it looks like the magazine will be making some changes. The new editor is doing a total reboot, and so a lot of content is being replaced with fresher, newer stuff. It's an exciting time for sure, but unfortunately, this means we won't be needing a regular column from you anymore. You're totally welcome to pitch ideas whenever you want, but they'll be judged on a case-by-case basis and won't be a regular thing. So sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Given that your contract was up anyway, the timing sort of works out for everyone.

I'll make sure we get the check out to you for your last column ASAP. Best of luck with everything!

Cheers, Jonah

Lizzie stared at the message, the world around her fading to silence. She read it two more times just to make sure she hadn't misunderstood anything. So that was it. Over. Like her show, like her book deals, like everything else. Over. Okay, so she wasn't fresh and new. She understood that. But she was only thirty! Surely she was still fresh-ish. People still loved her columns, or at least that's what the e-mails she received led her to believe. Granted, there had been fewer of those e-mails lately, but she hadn't received any telling her otherwise — that her recipes didn't work or that her recipe for kale chips was so ten years ago.

"I'm still ... somebody," Lizzie said to herself, her phone clutched in her hand.

"You won't be for long if you don't get out there," said Emilio, who'd snuck up behind her. "The boss will be pissed if he hears you were hanging in the truck all afternoon."

"Sorry. Coming." Lizzie slid the phone back on the dashboard, grabbed the tray of Greek curds, and tried to tell herself everything would be okay, even though at the moment she couldn't see how that could possibly be true.

CHAPTER 2

The problem was this: Lizzie was broke. Not properly broke, as in she had zero dollars in her bank account and nowhere to live, but "New York broke," in a way that was becoming increasingly unsustainable.

Six years ago, she never would have dreamed she'd be in this position. Looking back on it now, she realized that was probably part of the problem. But she'd had a successful show on the Food Network and a two-book cookbook deal with Clarkson Potter, and she was making good money — not millions or, frankly, anywhere close, but enough to live a comfortable life in a hip Brooklyn neighborhood. She'd been invited to openings of some of the coolest New York restaurants and went to all sorts of parties and events, where people recognized her and everyone she met wanted to be her new best friend. She'd buy those new friends rounds of drinks and at the end of the night could take cabs home without worrying too much about the cost.

What she soon discovered was that comfort in New York had no buffer. Her life was like a shaky tower built of Popsicle sticks, and removing just one caused the entire structure to collapse. Gone were her carefree days of meals out and regular taxis. She started scrimping and saving, eating nearly every meal at home and keeping only the essentials in her pantry. She invested in a good pair of sneakers and walked everywhere she could reach in forty-five minutes or less on foot and used buses and the subway for the rest. She couldn't remember the last time she'd bought a new article of clothing. Yet even with all of her commitment to frugality, she was still barely scraping by.

And now she was in even bigger trouble.

"Hey, what's with the sour puss?" Emilio asked as they packed up the truck. The event was over, and not a moment too soon.

"Nothing. Long day."

"Hey, at least they're paying you for this. It's not like you're working for free."

"Thank God for that."

Emilio laughed, but Lizzie didn't find any of this very funny. What was she going to do without the monthly check from Savor? They didn't pay her a fortune, but the thousand dollars she received each month helped defray the cost of her rent, which she was having more and more trouble paying.

Would she have to move to Queens? She'd already moved from her apartment in Park Slope to a smaller, cheaper place in neighboring Greenwood Heights, and even that rent was a stretch. Frankly, she was barely in Greenwood Heights. She was really in the northern part of the predominately Mexican and Chinese neighborhood of Sunset Park. But nearly everyone she knew lived in Brooklyn these days, and the prospect of moving away from them — not just physically but also financially — made her feel like an even bigger failure.

"Got any Mother's Day plans after this?" Emilio asked.

"I was thinking of taking the train to Philly to see my mom, but it kind of depends on the train schedule." And the ticket price, she added to herself.

"No kids of your own then?"

Lizzie flinched. "Of my own?"

She'd only met Emilio this morning, and she was pretty sure she hadn't said anything that would imply offspring of any kind.

"Yeah, I thought maybe ..." He trailed off, clearly rethinking whatever he'd been about to say.

"I'm not married," Lizzie said, waving her left hand.

"So? Doesn't mean you couldn't have a kid."

"Emilio, how old do you think I am?"

As soon as she spoke the words, she wished she hadn't. She wasn't ready to hear the answer, unless it was a number less than thirty.

"I dunno ... thirty?"

Lizzie's shoulders relaxed. He didn't think she was forty-two. Thank God.

She stiffened again, though, when she realized the implications of his answer: that thirty was a perfectly reasonable age to have a child. Because it was. Her mom had been thirty-one when she'd had Lizzie, and her aunt Linda had given birth at twenty-seven. Every day, it seemed, Lizzie was bombarded with images on Facebook of swaddled newborns in those little pink-and-blue-striped hats, the progeny of one of her classmates somewhere along the line. Every time she saw one of those photos, she had to fight the instinct to call one of her high school friends and exclaim, Oh my God, did you know Katie Allen got knocked up? In Lizzie's mind, they were all still so young — certainly too young to be parents. Parents were old. Parents were responsible.

But gradually Lizzie realized everyone else was growing up, while she was being left behind. She didn't even have a boyfriend, much less a baby. Right now she barely had a job. At least if she were still hosting Healthy U she could point to her highflying career and fast-paced lifestyle. But instead, she was hawking cottage cheese with some guy named Emilio and had just lost yet another source of income.

"Good guess," Lizzie said as Emilio sealed up the truck. "For a minute there you had me worried."

"I was right? You're thirty?"

"Yep," Lizzie said, and as she did she sounded almost as surprised as he did.

*
As soon as Lizzie reached her apartment building, her phone rang. It was her mom.

"Mom, hey — sorry, I'm only just getting back from this job."

"I guess that answers my question, then."

"Which was?"

"Whether or not you were on a train."

"Oh. No. Sorry."

"No need to apologize. I wasn't expecting it. Just hoping."

Lizzie opened the front door to her building. It was a three-story walk-up, sandwiched between brick row houses of varying shades of red, beige, and cream, all of which seemed to bear tin awnings over their front doors.

"I didn't expect the day to last this long. What time is it now? Five something?"

"Almost six."

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Virtually Perfect"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Paige Roberts.
Excerpted by permission of KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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