“Are you kidding?” London says. “McDonald’s is, like, the worst place on the planet. Do you know how much environmental destruction they’re basically completely responsible for? Anyone who eats at McDonald’s should be, like, reincarnated as a cow or something, so they can know what it’s like to be slaughtered for meat.”

“Oh,” says Kate. She has no idea what London is talking about. All she knows is that when London was small and her mother would leave her with Kate so she could party with her friends, the only thing that would keep London from screaming all night long was a Happy Meal. But Kate gives in and takes her instead to a café that sells ten-dollar sandwiches filled with ingredients she has never heard of, or if she has, she has forgotten what they are.

Food – what things are called, what they taste like – is something that Kate has lost touch with, to the point that she can only make maybe half a dozen simple meals. When she shops for food, she goes to the exact places in the store where she knows she can find the things she buys every week, and avoids the aisles that contain the multitudes of foods that she used to enjoy and now has no clue what they are. She covers this up by telling people that she can only eat certain things, that strange spices and sauces make her ill, that she will take everything plain. But she knows in the past she used to be an adventurous eater. Walter will tell her, “Oh, you used to love this,” and she’ll stare blankly into space, trying to picture what this is, what shape it takes on a plate, what sensations it produces on the tongue. But it is gone, all of it, and so she sticks to bread and cheese and butter, apples and potatoes and carrots, chicken and eggs and yogurt.