It was extraordinary. Not restaurant extraordinary—home extraordinary. The kind of food that tasted like someone’s kitchen, someone’s hands, someone’s entire history ground into stone and served on a chip.
“Michael.” She set the chip down. “This is really good.”
“It was hers.”
“Don’t make it smaller than it is. This is really, really good.”
His face did the thing—the recalibration, the number changing in a column. But this time it was more than that. This time the mask slipped for a full second and she saw the boy in the taqueria, standing next to his mother, learning to grind tomatoes because that’s what love looked like in Rosa’s kitchen.
“We could put this on the menu,” Anna said. “Chips and salsa. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Right now it’s the best thing in this building and I include the focaccia in that statement.”
“Your face didn’t say that.”
“My face said exactly that.”
They stood in the kitchen and looked at each other and didn’t look away and neither of them said anything about what was happening because naming it would change it and neither of them was ready for it to change.
“I should go,” Michael said.
“Yeah.”
He wrapped the molcajete in the cloth and put it back in the bag. Then he stopped. Took it out. Set it back on the prep counter, unwrapped.
“Leave it here,” he said. “If that’s okay.”
“It’s okay.”
He left. Anna stood in the kitchen with Rosa’s molcajete on the counter and the smell of salsa in the air and the sound of the ocean coming through the walls. She put the leftover salsa in a container and set it in the walk-in. She turned off the lights.
She locked the door and walked home and didn’t sleep for a long time.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The watercolor class was painting pelicans.
Diane had set up twelve easels in the community center’s back room, each one facing a photograph of a brown pelican perched on a piling. The photograph was fine. The pelicans were fine. Diane’s instruction—“capture the essence of the bird, not the bird itself”—was the kind of direction that meant nothing and couldn’t be argued with.
The Circle had come in force. Eleanor’s idea—“a group activity, something creative, good for morale”—which meant Eleanor had signed them all up and nobody had argued because arguing with Eleanor about scheduled activities was like arguing with weather.
Eleanor, two easels over, was painting something that looked less like a pelican and more like a weather system. Vivian had produced a pelican that was anatomically precise and entirely without soul, which Vivian seemed satisfied with. Nadine had arrived late wearing a hat the size of a satellite dish, set up her easel, and painted three bold strokes that bore no relationship to any bird that had ever lived. “Abstract pelican,” she’d announced, and opened a thermos that was almost certainly not water. Letty sat at the far easel, painting quietly, producingsomething that was actually quite good and that nobody had noticed because Letty never drew attention to her own work.
Margo painted the pelican in four strokes. It looked like a pelican. Diane said it needed “more feeling.” Margo added a second pelican behind the first one, because company seemed like a feeling, and Diane said “oh, interesting choice” in the voice she used when she meant “that’s not what I said.”
“You could try softening the wings,” Eleanor offered from her weather system.
“The wings are fine.”
“Diane said to capture the essence?—”
“I’ve captured more essence than Diane has seen in her life.” Margo set her brush down and wiped her hands on the smock she’d brought from home.
Margo looked at the room. The easels, the pelicans, the four women she’d known for forty years arranged around a community center back room at ten in the morning with paintbrushes. Two weeks of the Schedule. Garden club with Nancy and her koi. Book club where she’d read the book in two hours and spent the remaining four listening to people describe what they thought the author meant. Wine tasting where she’d pretended to care about tannins. And now pelicans.
“I’m going to the Shack,” she said.
