“Nope, not in the slightest,” Harper said.
“Yeah, absolutely not. I’m gonna say we are definitely not ready,” Nina said.
“Good,” Claire said. “That’s the whole point of all of this.”
CHAPTER 17
Claire’s kitchen smelled like mole. Not like Señora Morales’s mole, but Nina’s mole. Nina’s version, that she’d learned from the index cards and practiced over and over in her kitchen on Edisto until Elena tasted it and said, “It’s not David’s, it’s yours, and that’s better.” That was the highest compliment Elena had ever given that didn’t involve criticizing someone’s haircut in the same sentence.
Nina had brought the ingredients in two grocery bags and taken them over to Claire’s kitchen. And now she stood at the stove, toasting chilies on Claire’s comal, which Claire didn’t even own eleven months ago. She had bought one after cooking class because some things, once they enter your life, just refuse to leave.
Harper was on chili soaking duty, which meant she was just standing at the counter with a bowl of hot water and a timer on her phone.
“The recipe says fifteen minutes,” she said. “It has been eleven. I will report when we reach fifteen.”
“You know the chilies don’t care a thing about your timer, Harper,” Nina said.
“The chilies are soaking in water. They are subject to the law of physics, just like everything else.”
“Señora Morales said the chilies are done when they’re done, not when a phone tells them to be.”
“Well, Señora Morales is a culinary genius, I will admit that, but I’m a woman with a spreadsheet and a timer, and we have to work with what we have.”
Claire was chopping tomatoes. She was not good at chopping tomatoes, and she knew this. She mainly squished them instead of chopping them, but she didn’t care. She’d been practicing that sentence in various forms for almost a year now. She didn’t care. She just had to wait until she actually felt it.
She chopped the tomatoes unevenly, and they went into the roasting pan unevenly, but the mole would be no worse for it.
Tomorrow, they were all jumping out of an airplane.
The thought kept arriving uninvited, like a guest who shows up early and gets in your way the entire time you’re trying to prepare for a party. It just stood in the corner of every conversation, every laugh, every moment, waiting to be looked at and acknowledged.
Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, the three of them were going to drive to a small airfield outside of Beaufort, climb into a perfectly good plane, ascend to 14,000 feet, and then voluntarily, like three nutcases, on purpose, step out of the good airplane.
Claire had not told Greg any of the specifics. She just told him they were doing their last adventure tomorrow, and she’d be home by the afternoon. At least she prayed she would be home by the afternoon.
He had asked, for the first time in their marriage, “Well, what is it?”
And she had said, “Skydiving.”
He looked at her with an expression she’d never seen on his face before. Fear.
It wasn’t a confused concern or anything that looked distant. It wasn’t the man who had said “have fun” for six months without asking any questions. She saw real fear, the fear of a man who had just realized that his wife was about to throw herself out of an airplane, and he was not ready to lose her.
“Be very careful,” he said.
He said it while holding her hands, which he hadn’t done in the kitchen since their anniversary fifteen years ago. His eyes were actually a little wet.
Claire understood that his way of saying “be careful” was Greg’s way of saying, I love you, and I’m scared, and I’m only understanding right now what it would mean to lose you.
She kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll be careful.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
It was the most honest exchange they’d had outside of the doctor’s office, and it had happened over a cutting board, which seemed right, because the best conversations in a home always happened in the kitchen.
The mole took three hours to cook, and those three hours were the best part. It wasn’t the mole itself, although it was very good and rich and dark. The whole house smelled like someone’s grandmother’s kitchen. But the best part was the making of it. Nina at the stove, directing everyone. Harper at the counter, grinding spices in the molcajete that Nina brought because Claire’s spice grinder, according to Nina, was “a machine designed to remove the soul from cumin.” Claire was roasting tomatillos under the broiler, watching the skins blister and char.
