“And someone was always cooking. I just took all that good food for granted. Do you have those recipes?” I reach for a peeler and start shaving a cucumber.

“I definitely have a few that my mom uses, and my dad’s mom, but my abuelita never used recipes. She worked in a factory. So she’d get home after a long day and start rice in the rice cooker and throw together something for dinner. She still cooks that way. Meat, garlic, green pepper, onion, tomato sauce, and cumin, brown everything, cook for a while, and you’ve got dinner.”

“Well, whatever she did, it was fucking awesome.”

She gets a distant look on her face. “I see her a lot more now that I’m in Boston and only a few hours from her in New York.”

Right. I’d almost let myself forget that Rachel lives three thousand miles away.

“It’s been really great. I finally learned enough Spanish so the two of us can speak it together.”

“I thought you took Spanish in high school?”

She nods. “Yeah, I did, but I was never fluent. My parents didn’t speak it at home, and I gave my mom hell for that when I struggled with high school Spanish. They had their reasons—wanting me to ‘fit in’”—she air quotes it—“and wanting to make sure my English was solid. But my mom has said a few times she’d do it differently if she had it to do over again. She’s super psyched that I’m speaking it now with my grandmother—but it’s funny, my mom and I still always speak English. It’s like that’s where my relationship with her is stored in my brain.”

She reaches out a hand and tries to take a knife and a red pepper from me. “Give me that.”

I shake my head. “Answer’s still no.”

“I can’t believe you’re cooking for me!”

I think that’s the fifth time she’s said that. It’s really cute. And also makes me mad. Because how completely fucking ridiculous is it that her ex never cooked for her? The thing about Rachel is, she’s so easy to please. She’s beautiful and smart and sexy and uncomplicated and the littlest things make her light up: elk jerky and cherries, the rush of jumping into the lake, learning to cast, catching her first trout, narrating a boat trip to a six-month-old, watching me cook. It doesn’t take much to make her happy, and that asshole never even tried.

“What about your other grandparents?” I ask her.

“I see them, short visits, flights down to Miami, or weekends they come to see me and stay in a hotel. I miss the long visits.”