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.”
Nina’s tortillas were uneven and a little too thick, but they were exactly right. Her hands seemed to know how to do something her brain didn’t. The dough felt familiar, even though she had never done this a day in her life.
It was as if she had muscle memory that had been waiting for her, inherited over years of watching her husband, of standing next to him in their kitchen as he pressed and flipped and sang along to whatever was playing on the radio.
Señora Morales watched Nina. “Elena was right. You do have good hands.”
“Elena said that?”
“Oh, Elena said many things. Most of them are correct.”
They cooked tortillas on the comal, watching them puff and blister, the smell of toasted corn filling the kitchen.
Nina thought about all those mornings when David made tortillas for breakfast, standing at the stove in his boxers and a T-shirt, the one with holes in it, flipping them with his fingers because he said a spatula was for people who didn’t trust their own hands.
She ate one warm tortilla off the comal with nothing on it. It tasted like earth and corn and the ghost of those hundreds of Saturday mornings. She closed her eyes and let herself travel to that place where everything had been right in the world.
The mole took two whole hours.
Señora Morales guided them confidently, as someone who had done this countless times.
Toast the chilies, soak the chilies, roast the tomatoes and tomatillos, fry the tortilla pieces until they are dark and crispy, toast the spices, cumin, clove, black pepper, oregano, roast the garlic, blend everything in stages because mole was not a recipe that you could rush and throw everything together.
According to Señora Morales, it was an insult to the ingredients.
The chocolate went in last: two tablets of Mexican chocolate, dark, grainy, and sweet, dropped into the pot, where they melted slowly into the sauce, turning it from a dark red to a deep brown that was almost black.
The kitchen smelled like everything that was good in the world, the kind of smell that made you want to sit down and not get up again for a very long time.
Nina stirred the mole. Señora Morales had given her a spoon and then stepped back.
Claire and Harper stepped back, too, so that Nina stood at the stove alone.
She stirred the sauce that David’s grandmother had made in a kitchen in Oaxaca sixty years ago, that David’s mother had made in a kitchen in Charleston for thirty years, that David had made in their kitchen for years, and that Nina was now making in a stranger’s kitchen in Charleston, her hands shaking, her heart broken, with her two best friends who loved her enough to just stand in the corner and let her do this.
The smell of chocolate and chilies rose up and permeated the room. Nina stirred, and the tears came. She didn’t want to stop stirring.
They ran down her face and dropped into the pot, and she thought David would have said it was fine, that the best mole has a little salt, that food with tears was made with love.
Nobody said anything.
Claire put her hand over her mouth, and Harper just stood there still with her arms crossed. Señora Morales watched from the doorway.
She had seen grief walk through this kitchen before. That much was obvious. And she knew the best thing to do was just let it happen.
Nina stirred.
The mole thickened and darkened.
It looked like something David would have been really proud of. She could hear his voice in her head.
Stir slower, mi amor. You’re rushing it. Let it talk to you.
