We were standing in front of a cluster of large green cactuses. She said she hadn’t planned on growing them. What she had really wanted was mango or pineapple, but the trees couldn’t survive on her planet. Eventually she settled for eleven cactuses, by special order. Two had withered and died, but the rest managed to pull through. She couldn’t stand them at first, but she’d come to love them. A pair of worn-out gray gloves were lying next to one of the cactuses. She picked them up, put them on, and plucked a red prickly pear, splitting it open and offering me a piece.

“Isn’t it thorny?” I asked.

“Only on the outside.”

I warily accepted the piece. It was without a doubt the tastiest thing I had eaten in a long while. I said I was pretty sure it was the first time I’d had a prickly pear.

“Obviously,” she said, then told me they had stopped growing them on Earth a long time ago. They just didn’t have enough space over there. The only place you could get prickly pears was on the black market in China, and even there they grew them under the ground, which made them completely bland, because it’s the sun that gives them all their flavor. She said a few dozen prickly pears sets her up for a whole year. And people were willing to pay crazy money for them.

“Every once in a while some realtor shows up wanting to buy the planet,” she said and laughed. “Weird guys in suits. At first I thought you were one of them.” She told me she never actually listened to their pitch, but sometimes sold them a few prickly pears. Even gave them a discount if they promised to bring some to her family.

“Isn’t your family flipping out about you being here?” I asked.

“Flipping out? They’re the ones who encouraged me to move here,” she said.

“What do you mean? Why would they encourage you?”

She didn’t answer.