Chapter 6
Senora Morales lived in a pale yellow house on a side street in North Charleston. She had an overgrown garden that looked like it could feed the entire neighborhood.
The front yard was a barely controlled mound of herbs, peppers, and flowering plants that Nina definitely could not name. Plants climbed to the porch railing and spilled over into clay pots.
A hand-painted sign by the mailbox read “Cocina de Morales,” in letters that were a little crooked and very confident.
The house smelled, even from the driveway, like toasted chilies and something sweet. The smell hit Nina in the chest. David’s kitchen used to smell like this.
Not often because David was just a weekend cook, a man who spent Monday through Friday eating whatever was fast and then devoted Saturday mornings to the long, patient work of his grandmother’s recipes.
Mole that took five hours, tamales that took seven, black beans that simmered all day on the back burner while he played music too loud and danced with Lucia on his hips, her little hands covered in masa, both of them laughing at nothing and at everything.
Nina sat in the car for a moment. At least it was not forty-five minutes, not even ten.
Just a moment long enough to breathe in that smell and decide how she was going to walk into this house without falling apart.
Claire knocked on the passenger window.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. I’m coming.”
Harper was already on the porch, looking at the herb garden as if she were gathering data for a spreadsheet. She picked a leaf off something and sniffed it. “This is epazote,” she said.
“And how do you know that?” Claire said.
“I researched Oaxacan cuisine last night. You know I like to be prepared for things.”
“You researched for a cooking class?”
“I research everything. Knowledge is power, Claire.”
“It’s just beans and rice, not like we’re doing a hostile takeover of a corporation.”
The front door opened before Harper could say anything, and Senora Morales appeared.
She was small. Actually, she was tiny. That was the very first thing Nina noticed.
She was smaller than Elena, which Nina did not even think was possible.
She was maybe five feet tall in the slippers she wore, her silver-streaked black hair pulled back in a braid, and her brown skin shaped by decades of sun and laughter.
She wore a simple apron over a blue cotton dress. Her eyes were dark and warm, the eyes of a woman who could look at you once and tell whether you had even eaten breakfast. Much like Elena.
“You must be Nina.” Her accent was thicker than Elena’s. “Elena told me about you. She said you were ready.”
Nina did not know what Elena had told this woman. Knowing Elena, she had told her everything, down to Nina’s shoe size and astrological sign.
She had definitely told her about the marriage, the death, the grief, the frozen waffles, and the parking lots.
Elena did not believe in privacy when it came to family, and she considered Nina her family for life. That meant Nina’s business was Elena’s business, which was now apparently Senora Morales’ business.
“These are my friends,” Nina said. “Claire and Harper.”
Senora Morales looked at Claire, then at Harper, and then back at Nina.
“They cook?”
“Claire bakes,” Nina said. “I mean, Harper mostly just orders food and people bring it to her.”
“I can cook,” Harper said, obviously feeling under the microscope. This, of course, was said with the confidence of a woman who had only ever made pasta from a box.
Senora Morales smiled. “Come in. We start with the chili.”
The kitchen was very small, but it was immaculate. Most importantly, it was alive. Every surface had something on it.
Molcajetes in three sizes lined up on the counter. Big bundles of dried chilies hanging from hooks near a window. A comal on the stove that was so well seasoned, it was nearly black.
Stacks of big clay bowls in colors that reminded Nina of the pottery David used to buy whenever they visited his cousins in Oaxaca.
A radio on the windowsill played something soft and acoustic, barely audible amid the sound of Senora Morales moving around her kitchen.
There were four stations set up along a long wooden table that served as a workspace and a dining surface.
Cutting boards, bowls of ingredients, knives, and a small stack of index cards with handwritten recipes in Spanish.
Senora Morales had translated them into English underneath in very small letters.
“Today we make three things,” she said, tying on an apron like she was preparing for battle. “First, we make salsa de pasilla. Simple. It’s very good for beginners.” She looked at Harper. “Good for people who like to order in.”
“Oh, wow, I feel seen,” Harper said, putting a hand to her chest.
“Secondly, we make tortillas by hand. We’re not using a machine. Your hands learn the masa, or the tortilla is just bread.”
“And what’s the third thing?” Claire asked, studying the index cards.
Senora Morales looked at Nina. “Mole negro.”
The kitchen went silent.
It wasn’t because anyone understood the weight of the words, but because Nina did, and they could see the look on her face.
Mole negro was David’s favorite dish.
It was the recipe his grandmother had brought from Oaxaca to the United States in the sixties, written on a piece of paper that was so thin you could see through it.
It had been passed down to his mother, then to David, who spent 20 years perfecting it. He used to say that mole was not a sauce, it was a conversation between thirty ingredients, and they all had to learn to get along.
“Elena gave me the recipe,” Senora Morales said quietly. “Your husband’s family recipe. She said it was time someone else learned it.”
Nina’s throat felt tight. She nodded because she couldn’t form words. She felt Claire’s hand on her back.
“We start,” Senora Morales said matter-of-factly. She wasn’t unkind, but she was firm. Like many women of her age, there was no time to sit and stew over the things a person cannot change. There was only time to get on with it. “The chilies first. They need to toast.”
She handed each of them a dried pasilla chili. The skin was dark and papery, almost black. Nina held it to her nose. It smelled like smoke and earth.
David used to buy these by the pound at a shop on Rivers Avenue. He would come home with bags of dried chilies and spread them across the kitchen counter. Then he would sort them by type with seriousness.
“You hold it over the comal,” Senora Morales demonstrated, pressing the chili flat against the very hot surface with her bare fingers.
Claire was visibly nervous. “You count to ten, you flip, you count to ten again. When it blisters and the smell changes, it’s ready.
But don’t burn it. Burnt chili is an angry chili, and angry chili will ruin everything. ”
“Wow, that feels like a metaphor,” Harper said, nodding. “I think I’m an angry chili,” she said under her breath.
“It is a chili,” Senora Morales said flatly. “Not everything is a metaphor.”
They toasted chilies. Nina went first, pressing the pasilla to the comal and counting under her breath the way David used to. The smell filled the kitchen, smoky and sharp. It was so familiar that her hands started to shake, but she didn’t cry.
She just pressed the chili, counted, flipped, counted, and placed it in the bowl that Senora Morales held out. Her hands were shaking but steady, if that was even possible.
Claire toasted hers carefully and precisely, turning it exactly at ten seconds. She loved to follow directions to the letter.
Harper approached it the way she approached everything: with confidence, speed, and a slight overestimation of her own abilities.
She burned her first chili.
“Angry chili,” Senora Morales said, taking it from her.
“Well, I counted to ten.”
“Yes, but you counted to ten very fast. Chili does not care about your schedule.”
Nina laughed.
She felt it coming before she heard it, like a bubble rising through that tightening in her chest that had been there for so many months.
It surprised even her, because she had been so sure this morning that this was going to be hard.
She had braced herself for all the pain of it and forgotten to account for the possibility that it might also be enjoyable and even funny, that David’s food could bring her joy and grief in the same breath, and that she could allow both to exist in the same kitchen.
The tortillas were an absolute disaster.
Senora Morales mixed the masa with warm water and worked it in her hands until it reached a consistency that she could only describe as being “like a baby’s cheek,” which was the most specific and least helpful cooking instruction Claire had ever received in her entire life.
She handed each of them a ball of dough and a tortilla press, then stepped back to watch.
She had probably seen hundreds of people fail at this and found it both amusing and educational.
Claire’s first tortilla was way too thick. Her second was so thin it had holes in it. Her third was a shape that could only be described as oval, but was more accurately a huge mistake.
She was concentrating so hard that a small line had appeared between her eyebrows. It was the same line she got when she was grading papers or trying to do any other task that required full, meticulous attention.
“You think too much,” Senora Morales told her. “Tortillas don’t want you to think. They want you to feel.”
“Well, I’m not very good at that,” Claire said. She meant the tortilla, but the words came out carrying more weight than she probably intended.
Harper’s tortillas were pretty decent, surprisingly.
She pressed the dough with decisive force, like she brought to everything, and the results were round and even and quite competent, which was the word for most things that Harper produced.
“Natural talent,” Harper said, holding one up. “It’s a circle.”
“Most preschoolers can do that,” Nina said, laughing.
“It’s a perfect circle. Geometry matters.”