Chapter 6 #3
But Harper did not say any of that, because Harper, despite all her sharpness, knew when a friend just needed space more than they needed truth. So she reached over and squeezed Claire’s hand.
“Let’s clean up,” Senora Morales said, rising from the table.
She was a woman with authority, redirecting the room.
“And then I will send you home with enough mole for your families. Then you’ll come back, and we will make tamales another day.
” She looked at Nina. “Your mother-in-law will expect tamales.”
“Oh, my mother-in-law expects everything,” Nina said.
They cleaned the kitchen together, washing dishes, wiping counters, putting things back in their places.
Claire dried the bowls carefully.
Harper organized the spice jars by height because Harper could never help herself.
Nina swept the floor and found, near the leg of the table, a small dollop of chocolate from the mole. She wiped it up with her finger and thought about this being the best day she had had in so long.
The drive home was quieter than normal. Claire drove, and Harper sat in the passenger seat with a container of mole balanced on her lap.
Somehow, she had managed the entire day without staining her beautiful silk blouse. It was a miracle. Nina considered it evidence of either the divine or of Harper’s sheer force of will.
Nina sat in the back with two containers, one for herself, one for Elena, because Senora Morales had insisted and because Nina wanted Elena to taste it.
She wanted Elena to know that someone else had taught her the recipe, that it was okay, and that the food hadn’t been lost when David died. It was still here, in a little kitchen in North Charleston, in Nina’s hands, and on index cards that she would one day give to her daughter.
The late-afternoon sun slanted through the windshield as they crossed the Ashley River. Claire’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, telling Nina more than any words could.
“You know, you don’t have to talk about it,” Nina said from the backseat, “but you can if you want.”
Claire was quiet for a long stretch of the road. They passed live oaks draped in moss, shadows across the asphalt.
“He’s not wrong,” Claire finally said. “I am gone a lot more than I used to be. Three Saturdays in a row now. I went shopping alone last Saturday, and I went to that new book club the Saturday before that.”
“Well, you’re allowed to leave your house on a Saturday, Claire. It’s not like you’re going out on dates with other men,” Harper said, looking over at her.
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
Claire didn’t answer. The road curved through a stretch of marsh.
“He used to ask me where I was going,” Claire said. “You know, years ago, he’d ask, and I’d tell him, and he’d say, ‘Oh, have fun.’ Now he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t ask where I’m going. He just asks when I’m coming back. There’s a difference there.”
Nina understood the difference. One indicated interest, and the other just indicated someone taking inventory. One said, I care about your life. The other said, I need to know when my life goes back to normal.
“What do you want to do about it?” Nina asked quietly.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”
The way she said it, quiet and honestly bewildered, told Nina this was the truest thing Claire had said about her marriage in years. She didn’t seem angry or sad.
She just seemed genuinely confused, because she was a woman who had spent twenty-six years building something and was now starting to realize she didn’t know what she’d built or even how strong it was.
They dropped Harper at her building in Charleston. Then Claire drove Nina to Edisto, and the road narrowed to two lanes. Nina got out of the car with her containers, but she leaned back through the window.
“Claire?”
“Yeah?”
“You know what Senora Morales said about the tortilla? That you don’t want to think, that it wants you to feel?” Claire just looked at her. “Well, anyway, maybe that’s not just about the tortillas.”
She didn’t wait for Claire to respond. She just squeezed her arm through the window and walked up the porch steps, the marsh singing its night song as Nina walked into her kitchen and put the mole on the counter.
She called Elena. She answered on the first ring, which meant she had been sitting there waiting.
“So how was it?” Elena asked.
“I made the mole, Elena.”
A silence settled. Nina could hear Elena’s shallow breaths, imagining her in her modest house surrounded by little saints on the shelf and photos of David adorning every wall.
“Was it good?”
“Senora Morales said David taught me something after all.”
Elena made a noise that was neither quite a laugh nor a cry. It was the sound of a mother hearing her deceased son’s name spoken with affection by someone gradually learning to honor his memory.
“I’ll bring you some tomorrow,” Nina said.
“Bring Lucia,” Elena said. “We’ll eat together.”
“Okay.”
“And Nina?”
“Yeah?”
“Good girl.”
Elena hung up because she didn’t believe in long goodbyes.
Nina stood in her kitchen holding her phone, next to the mole on the counter, feeling like she was finally in the right place for once.