She can’t hear me. I know that. I know what happens when an organism dies. I can’t help it, though. I want to talk to my mom. I want her to walk down the stairs in her old man’s plaid bathrobe that she stole from Pappoús before he died. I want her to start putting things on the counter.

But there’s just me.

I open the fridge and scan the contents. It’s still pretty full, since Mom and Dad only left a week ago. There are veggies in the drawer. Broth in the cupboard. Cans of beans and tomatoes.

What is a soup for the dead?

Mom made avgolemono—Greek chicken soup—when Yia-yia died, back in the old country, where she bought a house surrounded by olive trees. Mom cried the whole time, her tears falling into the pot as she stirred. As I juiced lemons, she’d told me how her mother had taught her to make soup when she was a little girl, just like she had taught Nah and me. Our religion: the Gospel of Soup, the salvation of the spoon. It’d be nice to make avgolemono for her, but we don’t have chicken. Dad hates lentil and Mom only likes vegetable when she’s just come back from the farmers’ market. Besides, I should use these serrano chiles. Mom hates when things go to waste.

Chili. Chili nights are always fun. I don’t know why—maybe it’s the spiciness. The last time we had chili, Dad did his impression of the dean of the physics department and Nah got video of him pretending to fall asleep halfway through a lecture on quantum mechanics. Why didn’t we take more pictures? Why didn’t we take video of everything? Dad drinking his morning coffee, Mom watering the basil plant on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. She always insisted on talking to the plants when she watered them. Said it made them grow better, which is actually true. I pull out my phone and add watering plants to the list of things to do—keeping things alive is a way to work the problem of death. I haven’t told Nah about this list because she lives in an alternate reality pretty much all the time. For example, she still doesn’t know which clothes aren’t supposed to go in the dryer.

She thinks they are coming back to water plants and get oil changes and pay the electricity bill. I don’t know how long it’s okay to let her keep thinking that.