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Kara had brought everything.
She came into Lena's office at noon with two paper bags, a cardboard carrier of drinks, and the shining, breathless expression of a woman who has stumbled onto the best secret in the city. She kicked the door shut with her heel, set the whole haul down on the glass table by the window, and began to unpack it with great ceremony.
"There's a new place," she said. "Two blocks from my apartment. It's called Casa Mireya. It's very small. It's got eight tables and a grandmother."
"A grandmother?"
"She comes out of the kitchen every hour to check on everyone's faces." Kara pulled out a small white box. "She looked at mine and said, 'Too thin,' and gave me a second flan."
Lena laughed.
It was an ordinary Thursday, in the soft gold light of early autumn. She had spent the morning in a budget review and the last ten minutes staring out the window with a cold cup of tea. Now, as the smell of caramel and cinnamon drifted up from the table, she felt something in her shoulders unlock.
"You bought all of it."
"I bought some of it."
"Kara, there are nine boxes."
"I wanted you to try everything."
It was their usual lunch, the one they had been keeping, every Thursday, for months. It had begun as an excuse. Let's catch up on the Foundation business. It had turned, over time, into something quieter and more important. They sat on the couch by the window, with their shoes off, and talked about everything and nothing, and Lena found herself checking the clock on Wednesday nights.
Kara opened the boxes one by one.
There was a flan, glossy and trembling in its caramel moat. There were churros, long and golden, with a little cup of dark chocolate. There was a slice of tres leches cake, so soaked it glistened. There was a custard tart, and a pair of sugar-dusted pastries, and a tiny glass dish of something pale pink and creamy that Kara declared "a mystery."
"Try the flan," said Kara.
Lena tried the flan.
It was beautiful. Smooth, and rich, with a bitter edge of burnt sugar. She closed her eyes.
"It's wonderful."
"I told you."
"You did."
They moved through the churros, and the cake, and the mystery pink thing, which turned out to be guava. Kara talked the whole time, in her warm, tumbling, enthusiastic way, about the grandmother and the chef and the waiter, who had apparently recited the entire dessert menu from memory in four languages. Lena listened, and ate, and smiled.
At the very bottom of the last bag was a small, plain, round ceramic bowl.
"Oh," said Kara. "And this one. The grandmother made me take it. She said, 'This is the one that matters.'"
She lifted the lid.
Inside was a pale, creamy, fragrant dish, dusted with a thin layer of cinnamon. It was still faintly warm.
Arroz con leche, said a little handwritten card tucked under the rim. Rice pudding.
Lena stopped.
She did not know why.
It was only a bowl. It was only rice and milk, and a sprinkle of spice. But something about the smell, soft and sweet and faintly warm with something she could not name, hit her under the ribs like a hand.
"Lena?"
"I'm fine."
"You've gone pale."
"I'm fine." She took the spoon. She took a bite.
It was good.
That was the thing. It was good. It was creamy, and sweet, and thick with the gentle comfort of milk and rice. It had cinnamon in it. It had honey, perhaps, or sugar. It had, underneath, the faintest sharp, warm, strange little note of something else, like a bell very far away.
Clove, she thought.
Her throat closed.
She was suddenly, with total clarity, in a kitchen.
It was a small kitchen. It was low-ceilinged, and yellow, and smelled of woodsmoke and rain. There was a big scarred table, and a heavy black stove, and a window above the sink, with a blue teacup on the sill. And at the stove, with her back to the room, in a faded green apron, stood a woman, stirring a pot.
Mama.
She was humming.
It was a low, tuneless, contented little hum, the sound of a woman with nothing in the world to worry about. Her dark hair was pinned up with a wooden clip. A strand had come loose, and curled at her neck. She was stirring slowly, with a long wooden spoon, in a steady, patient, endless circle.
"Come here, a stór," she said, without turning.
Lena, aged seven, with scabbed knees and a gap in her teeth, climbed onto the stool.
"Watch," said her mother. "Slowly. It doesn't like to be rushed."
"Why not?"
"Because it's a thing that's made with time." She smiled over her shoulder. "You can't skip it. If you try, it knows."
"How?"
"It goes wrong."
"What's wrong?"
"It goes thin," said her mother, softly. "It forgets what it's for."
She held out a spoon.
Lena, with a very solemn face, blew on it, and tasted. It was warm, and sweet, and thick, and it slid down her throat like a hug. She closed her eyes.
"Well?" said her mother.
"It's the best," whispered Lena.
"Lena."
She blinked.
She was on the couch. It was the middle of the afternoon. The office was very quiet. A faint traffic hum drifted up from the street below. Kara was sitting in front of her, with a worried, searching look on her face, and a hand on her knee.
"You've been staring at that spoon for five minutes."
"Have I?"
"You didn't answer when I said your name."
"I'm sorry. I was..." She swallowed. "I was far away."
"Where?"
"Somewhere I haven't been in a long time."
Kara said nothing.
She only waited, with her warm hand on Lena's knee, in the late gold light.
"It reminded me of my mother," said Lena. "She used to make it. When I was small. Every Sunday." She turned the spoon in her fingers. "It's very good. It's, there's nothing wrong with it. It's creamy. It's sweet. It's got the cinnamon, and the, the clove."
"But?"
"But it isn't right."
"What's wrong with it?"
"I don't know."
"Too sweet?"
"No."
"Too thick?"
"No."
"Too warm?"
"It isn't any of that." Lena put the spoon down. She looked at the bowl. Her eyes were suddenly very bright. "It's something else. It's, I can't, it's something I can't name. It's like a, a word on the tip of my tongue. And I've been trying to remember it for twenty years."
Kara moved closer.
She put her arm around Lena's shoulders, and drew her in against her side. She said nothing, and asked nothing. She just held her, quietly, while the sun slid across the floor and the last of the steam rose from the little ceramic bowl.
---
She could not sleep.
She lay in her great white bed, in the great white silence of her penthouse, staring at the ceiling. She tried counting. She tried breathing. She tried a long, slow, careful meditation on the state of the quarterly earnings. Nothing worked. Every time she closed her eyes, she was back in a yellow kitchen, with the smell of woodsmoke and a humming voice.
At midnight, she gave up, and reached for her phone.
Arroz con leche recipe.
There were nine million results.
She read them in the dark. She read the traditional ones, and the modern ones, and the ones with condensed milk, and coconut, and pumpkin spice. She read a very long blog post by a woman in Valencia, who insisted that the secret was patience. She read a forum thread in which sixty people argued about whether to add the cinnamon stick at the beginning or the end.
Short-grain rice.
Whole milk.
A long, slow simmer.
A single clove.
She tried them, one at a time, in her mind. She laid each of them next to the memory, like a piece of tracing paper over a drawing. None of them fit.
At two, she got out of bed and padded to the kitchen in her bare feet.
She stood in front of the pantry.
There was rice. There was milk. There was, buried at the back of a drawer, a small jar of whole cloves that she had never opened. She took them out. She turned them over in her hand, and smelled them. They were sharp, and warm, and faintly bitter.
That's it, she thought. That's the smell.
But it isn't the taste.
She put them down.
She sat at the counter in the dark, with her head in her hands, and she did something she had not done since she was nine years old.
She said, out loud, in a very small voice:
"Mama, what did you do?"
The kitchen was silent.
The refrigerator hummed. A car passed in the street. On the wall, the clock ticked toward three.
She sat there until dawn.
-----
Kara found her at ten the next morning.
She had come to L-Corp for their usual walk to the café, and found the corner office door closed, and Jess at her desk, wringing a pen to death between her fingers. The assistant looked up with a face of such open and unguarded relief that Kara stopped in her tracks.
"Is she in there?"
"She's been in there since six."
"Is she okay?"
"She hasn't said a word." Jess lowered her voice. "She came in, and sat at the desk, and she's been staring at the same piece of paper for four hours. She hasn't had coffee. She told me to cancel everything and then she didn't say why."
Kara's stomach turned over.
She pushed open the door.
Lena was sitting at the desk, in yesterday's blazer, with her hair coming loose and her chin on her fist. She had a stack of papers in front of her. She was not reading them. Under her eyes were two deep, bruised, violet shadows, and her skin had gone the color of old paper.
"Lena," said Kara, gently.
"Hmm?"
"You didn't sleep."
"No."
"At all."
"No."
Kara crossed the room.
She did not say you should rest. She did not say this is silly. She sat down on the edge of the desk, and turned, and put a hand against Lena's cheek, and looked into her tired, red-rimmed, fever-bright eyes.
"Tell me," she said.
And Lena did.
She told her all of it.
She talked for an hour, in a low, quick, trembling voice. She told her about the kitchen. About the stove, and the stool, and the long wooden spoon. About her mother's hands, and her humming, and the feel of a warm spoon against her lips. About a Sunday, long ago, when she had been very small, and the whole world had smelled of cinnamon. About the funeral, and the black car, and the stranger's hand on her shoulder, and the way all of it, every bit of it, had been taken away.
She talked about the rice pudding.
"I can't taste it," she said. "I mean, I can. I can taste the one from the restaurant. It's very good. It's just, it isn't hers. It isn't what she made. And I keep thinking, if I could just remember, if I could only taste it again, then she'd, then I'd..." She stopped. She pressed her fingers against her eyes. "I'm being ridiculous."
"You're not."
"It's a dessert."
"It isn't just a dessert."
"No," whispered Lena. "It isn't."
Kara did not say anything.
She had not interrupted once. She had listened, with her hand on Lena's cheek and her blue eyes steady, nodding, now and then, at the right places, letting her talk. She had not offered a solution. She had not tried to fix it. She had simply been there, a warm and silent and endless presence, like the sun.
For a long time, there was no sound but the ticking of the clock.
Then Lena stood.
She did it quite suddenly. She pushed back her chair, and straightened her shoulders, and wiped her face with the heel of her hand. She looked, for a moment, like the woman who had walked into a hundred boardrooms, calm and cool and utterly decided.
"We need to go to Ireland," she said.
Jess, on the other side of the door, had her ear pressed to the wood.
She had been there for forty minutes.
She had no shame about it. She had spent three years studying the sounds of that office, and she had learned to read the silences as well as the words. She had known, as soon as she saw her boss at six o'clock that morning, in yesterday's blazer, with the bruised eyes and the stiff hands, that something was wrong.
She had called Kara at eight.
Now, at the sound of those six words, she straightened up like a soldier.
She was already dialing.
"Yes," she said, into the phone, in a low, brisk, perfectly composed voice. "I need the Gulfstream. Fueled, and ready to leave in ninety minutes. National City to Shannon. Yes. Yes. Private terminal. I need a car, and a rental vehicle waiting at the other end, and a, no, I don't care what's in the calendar. Move it. Move all of it."
She hung up, and dialed again.
"Hello? Yes. This is Jess Tremaine in Ms. Luthor's office. I'm going to need you to clear every meeting for the next five days. Tell the board she's indisposed. No. Family."
She hung up.
She sat very still for a moment, with her hand pressed to her mouth.
Then, with a little sniff, she reached for the tissue box.
"Here's the itinerary," said Jess, an hour later, handing Kara a folder. She was standing in the lobby, in a gray suit, with her arms folded tight across her chest. Her eyes were suspiciously bright. "The jet's at the private terminal. It's fueled, and the crew's been briefed. There's a car waiting at Shannon. I've booked a hotel in Limerick, in case she wants to stay."
"Thank you."
"She'll want to rent her own car. She'll insist. Let her."
"I will."
"She hasn't eaten since yesterday. There's a bag of food in the galley. Make sure she has some. If she says no, put it in her hand."
"I will."
"And Kara?"
"Yes?"
"Don't let her do it alone."
Kara looked at her.
It was a very small, very fierce, very private sentence, and it came out of Jess in a sort of whisper. She was standing perfectly straight, with her chin lifted, and her glasses a little crooked, and a single tear running down the side of her nose.
"I won't," said Kara.
"Good."
"I promise."
"Good," said Jess, and turned, quite quickly, and walked back to her desk.
They did not take the car.
It was a forty-minute drive to the airport in rush-hour traffic, and Lena had not slept in thirty hours, and Kara had no intention of watching her sit in a stopped car with her eyes closed. She took her to the roof. She stood her up at the edge, in the cool October wind, with the whole city spread out below them.
"Hold on," she said.
"To what?"
"To me."
Lena put her arms around her neck.
She had done it before. She knew, now, the sudden, rushing lift, the dizzy plunge in her stomach, the roar of the wind in her ears. But this time she did not scream. She did not laugh. She only pressed her face against Kara's shoulder, and shut her eyes, and let herself be carried.
They flew over the harbor.
They flew over the bay, and the long gray ribbon of the highway, and a wide, shimmering field of solar panels, with the sun on them like spilled coins. The air smelled of salt and diesel. The wind was cold. Lena felt Kara's arms, very strong and very gentle, around her back, and the steady drumbeat of her heart.
I've never, she thought, felt so safe.
The Gulfstream was waiting on the tarmac.
It was a sleek white thing, with its stairs down and its engines idling, and a steward in a navy uniform standing at the foot of them, holding a clipboard. He looked at the two women, landing lightly on the asphalt, with a very slight raise of his eyebrows. He did not comment.
"Ms. Luthor," he said. "Ms. Danvers. Welcome aboard."
The cabin was warm, and quiet, and smelled of leather. There were wide cream seats, and a little table, and a basket of fruit. Lena sank into the seat by the window, and put her head against the glass. She was shaking, very slightly, all over. Her hands were cold.
Kara took the seat opposite.
The engines whined. The jet rolled out onto the runway, turned, and began to gather speed. The ground blurred. The nose lifted. There was a long, soft, rising shudder, and then the pavement fell away, and the city dropped beneath them, shrinking, a spill of silver and gold.
Kara watched Lena.
She was staring out the window, with her forehead pressed against the cold pane, and her eyes fixed on a point very far away. She looked small. She looked very, very tired. A thin silver line of tears had begun to slide down her cheek, and she did not seem to notice.
Kara unbuckled her seat belt.
She stood, and crossed the aisle, and sat down in the seat beside Lena's. It was a wide seat, but not that wide. She shifted, and tucked her legs under her, and slid an arm along the back of the cushion.
"Is it okay?" she said.
Lena looked at her.
Her eyes were red and swimming. Her mouth trembled. For a moment, she looked as though she might say something, and could not find the words.
She nodded.
She turned, slowly, and leaned her whole weight against Kara's side, and pressed her face into her neck. Her arm came around Kara's waist. Her fingers curled into the front of her sweater, tight, as though she were afraid it might disappear.
Kara held her.
She tucked her chin against the top of Lena's head. She rubbed a slow, steady circle on her back. She did not speak. She only breathed, and held on, and let her feel the warmth of her.
"Sleep," she murmured. "I've got you."
Lena let out a long, shaky, shuddering breath.
It was the first real breath she had taken in thirty hours.
She was asleep in four minutes.
----
She woke to the sound of Kara's voice.
"Lena. Hey. Lena. We're here."
She opened her eyes.
The cabin was dim. Gray light seeped through the window. The engines had stopped. Her cheek was pressed against a warm, familiar shoulder, and a blanket had been tucked around her knees. A soft hand was stroking her hair.
"We're where?"
"Ireland."
She sat up.
She felt, for a moment, dizzy and strange, like waking in a dream. Then it hit her. The cabin. The window. The rain, drumming on the glass. She looked out, and saw a long gray runway, and a low gray terminal, and beyond it, in the distance, a line of soft green hills.
Her heart gave a single hard thump.
"Come on," said Kara, gently. "Let's get some coffee."
She rented a car.
She insisted on it. She would not let Kara drive, or a driver, or even a navigation system. She took the keys herself, in a small, stiff, clenched hand, and slid behind the wheel of a battered little hatchback, and pulled out of the lot into the rain.
She did not look at the map.
She did not need to.
She drove through the green, in the gray, with the wipers beating, down a long slow ribbon of road. The hills rolled past on either side. Stone walls and gray sheep. A church spire. A crossroads. A pub with a crooked sign. She did not speak. Kara, in the passenger seat, did not either. She only sat, with her hands folded in her lap, looking out the window at the rain.
They drove for two hours.
By the end of them, the road had dwindled to a single narrow lane, bordered by hedges, dripping and black. The village had fallen far behind. The sky had begun to clear, in thin, pale, silver streaks. And at the end of the lane, in the shelter of an old, crooked oak, stood a small gray cottage with a slate roof.
Lena stopped the car.
She turned off the engine.
For a long time, she did not move.
"Is this it?" said Kara, softly.
"This is it."
"It's small."
"It's very small."
"It's, it looks like it's been, it's been empty for a long time."
"Twenty-two years," said Lena.
She said it in a voice so quiet that Kara almost didn't hear.
She sat with her hands on the steering wheel, staring through the windshield at the house. It had a crooked chimney. It had a sagging roof. It had windows boarded with gray planks, and a front door that hung from one hinge, and a garden full of brambles. A single yellow leaf drifted down from the oak, and settled on the hood of the car.
"I'm not sure," she said, "that I can."
"You can."
"I'm afraid."
"I know."
"What if it's, what if I go in, and there's nothing? What if it's just, an empty room? What if I..." She swallowed. "What if I don't feel anything?"
Kara reached across the gearshift, and took her hand.
"Then we'll sit in the car," she said. "And have a sandwich. And try again tomorrow."
Lena made a small, wet, startled sound.
It was almost a laugh.
"That's very practical."
"I'm known for it."
"You've never been practical in your life."
"I'm adaptable," said Kara.
Lena squeezed her hand.
She took a deep breath. She opened the car door, and stepped out into the cold, damp, green-smelling air.
The door gave way under her hand with a long, tired groan.
Inside, it was dark, and cold, and thick with dust. A smell of damp stone and old wood rose out of the floorboards. The light from the open door fell across the kitchen in a pale, slanting bar, lit with floating motes. A big oak table. A rusted iron stove. A pair of tiny boots by the door, stiff with age.
She stood in the doorway, and breathed.
Lavender, she thought, dazedly. Woodsmoke.
Rain.
She stepped inside.
She did not hesitate. She did not look at the stove, or the table, or the small blue cup on the sill. She crossed the floor in a straight line, her footsteps echoing in the stillness, to a low wooden cupboard in the far corner of the room.
It had a little brass handle, worn smooth.
She opened it.
Inside were shelves. A few chipped plates. A tin of tea, rusted shut. A jar of something black and dried that had once been jam. And on the bottom shelf, wedged at the back, wrapped in a faded cloth, lay a book.
She did not know how she knew it was there.
She simply knew.
She knelt, and drew it out, with both hands, as though it might break. It was thick, and soft, and cracked at the spine. It was bound in dark green leather, stamped with a faded design of leaves. She wiped the dust from the cover with her sleeve.
There was a name on the flyleaf.
Elizabeth Walsh.
Lena sat down on the floor.
She did it quite slowly, with her back against the cupboard and her knees drawn up, in the dust, in the cold, in the slanting gray light. She opened the book. She turned a page. It was covered in handwriting, small, slanted, quick, the handwriting of a woman who had written in a hurry, between other things. There were recipes. There were notes. There were little pencil sketches, in the margins, of birds and flowers and a very small, very round child with a gap in her teeth.
She turned another page.
And another.
She was crying.
She did not know when it had begun. It had simply arrived, silent and steady, a warm flood sliding down her cheeks. She turned pages blindly. Soda bread. Barmbrack. A stew, with a little drawing of a pot. A cake, with a little drawing of a candle.
Lena's birthday, said a note, in the corner. She likes the lemon.
She made a sound.
She put her hand over her mouth, and bent over the page, and the sound came out of her in a long, shaking sob.
"Lena."
Kara was in the doorway.
She had not come in. She had stood back, in the gray light, with her hands in her pockets, giving her room. But now she crossed the floor in three swift strides, and knelt in the dust beside her, and put an arm around her shoulders.
"It's all right," she murmured. "I'm here."
"I found it."
"I see."
"I knew it was here. I just, I knew, I..."
"I know."
"Look."
She turned the page.
It was near the back of the book. It was a plain page, a little yellowed, with a faint brown stain in one corner, like a tea ring. At the top, in a larger, rounder hand, a title had been written, and underlined twice.
Arroz con Leche. (For Lena. For Sundays.)
Lena could not read the rest.
The words had begun to swim. She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes, and breathed in, and out, and in. When she lowered it, she saw that Kara was looking at her, with a quiet, steady, tearful smile.
"That's it," said Kara.
"That's it."
"That's your mother's."
"That's hers."
She closed the book.
She did it very gently. She held it against her chest, with both arms around it, and rocked, a little, back and forth. She was weeping freely now, without shame, with her cheek against the cracked green leather.
Kara sat beside her, in the dust, and held on.
----
They went into town, afterward.
It was a very small town, with one street, and one grocer, and a bakery that smelled of yeast and warm sugar. Lena walked down it with the book in her bag, and a small stiff smile on her face, and an odd, dreamlike calm. People looked at her. An old man tipped his cap. A woman in a doorway gave her a long, curious look, and half raised a hand.
They know me, she thought, with a sort of wonder. They remember.
She did not stop.
In the grocer's, she took a basket, and moved along the shelves with Kara trailing behind her. She read the recipe aloud, in a low, steady voice, from the little green book. She said it like a prayer.
"Short-grain rice. A cup."
Kara put a bag in the basket.
"Whole milk. Four cups. The full-fat kind, from the farm. Not the pasteurized."
Kara found a glass bottle in the back of the cooler, thick with cream.
"Honey."
"Local?"
"She'd have used the local."
"There's a jar from the Murphys."
"That's the one."
"A stick of cinnamon."
"There."
"And one clove."
Kara paused, with her hand on a rack of little glass jars.
"Just one?"
"One." Lena was reading very carefully, with her finger beneath the line. "She's written a note. One clove only. Two is for the angry. Three is for the sorry."
Kara laughed, helplessly, with her eyes wet.
"She sounds wonderful."
"She was."
"I'd have liked her."
"She'd have adored you," said Lena. "She'd have fed you until you couldn't move."
"That," said Kara, with deep satisfaction, "is the nicest thing anyone's ever said."
They bought pots, too.
There was a hardware store at the end of the street, run by a stout, gray-haired man in suspenders, who looked at the two women with open, friendly curiosity, and sold them a heavy, deep, copper-bottomed saucepan, a wooden spoon, a ladle, a set of mismatched bowls, a pair of tin cups, and a small, battered electric camp stove, on which, he said, he had personally cooked a hundred breakfasts.
"You'll be wanting a power outlet," he said.
"There's one in the house."
"It might still work. I'd try it before you count on it."
"Thank you."
"Are you the Walsh girl?"
Lena froze.
"I, yes," she said, after a moment. "I was."
"I thought so. You've her eyes." He rang up the stove. "I'm sorry for your loss. She was a good one. Used to bring my mam soda bread, when she was ill."
Lena could not speak.
"You'll be wanting to come back, then," he said, kindly. "To the house."
"I think," said Lena, slowly, "I'm trying."
"Good," said the old man, and put a packet of matches in the bag, free of charge.
----
ARROZ CON LECHE
(from the book of Elizabeth Walsh)
INGREDIENTS
1 cup short-grain rice
2 cups water
1 cinnamon stick
1 whole clove (one only)
4 cups whole milk
½ cup honey
A pinch of salt
Ground cinnamon, for the top
METHOD
Rinse the rice until the water runs clear. This is the hardest part. Be patient.
Put the rice in the pot with the water, the cinnamon stick, and the clove. Bring it to a gentle boil, then lower the flame.
Cook, uncovered, until the water is soaked up, about fifteen minutes. Do not leave it. Do not walk away. It will notice.
Add the milk, a little at a time, stirring. Do not pour it all in at once. The rice must be allowed to drink.
Stir. Slowly. In one direction. For forty minutes, until it thickens and starts to look like cream. Do not hurry. It forgets what it's for.
Stir in the honey, last. Add the salt. Taste.
Remove the cinnamon and the clove. (Keep the clove. Put it in your pocket. It's for luck.)
Serve it warm, in the good bowls. Dust with cinnamon.
Eat it with someone you love.
----
The house, when they lit the stove, did not seem so cold.
It took them an hour to clean the kitchen. Kara swept. Lena scrubbed. They dragged the old oak table into the middle of the room, and wiped it down, and set two mismatched chairs on either side. They found a window that opened, and a rag, and a bucket. They hung a pair of dishcloths on a nail. Somewhere in the cupboards they found a box of candle stubs, and lit three, and set them on the sill.
The outlet worked.
Lena set the little electric stove on the counter. She plugged it in. A red light glowed. She put the saucepan on the ring, and stood back, and looked at it.
"Well," she said.
"Well."
"Do you want to, ah, to help?"
"I'd love to."
"It's a very, I'm told it's very slow."
"I'm very good at slow."
"You aren't."
"I can be," said Kara, "when it matters."
Lena's mouth curved.
She opened the book, and propped it against the sugar tin, and began.
They rinsed the rice together.
They stood at the sink, side by side, with the cold water running over their hands. It was surprisingly difficult. The water ran milky, and then cloudy, and then, very slowly, clear. Kara got impatient. Lena batted her hand away.
"Again," she said.
"It's clear."
"It's cloudy."
"It's clear enough."
"Again."
"She said it's the hardest part," said Kara, with a sigh, and rinsed it again.
They put the rice in the pot, with the water, and the cinnamon, and the single clove. Lena held it up first, between two fingers, a little dark nail of a thing, and looked at it, and breathed in.
Lavender, she thought. Woodsmoke.
She dropped it in.
The pot began to bubble.
They stood together at the stove, watching it, in the flickering candlelight. The smell rose up, warm and sharp and sweet. Kara had put her chin on Lena's shoulder. She was resting a hand lightly on her back. She had not asked a single question. She had come all this way without a word, on a plane, and in a car, and through a dusty door. She had hugged her, every time a tear began to shine.
She's here, thought Lena.
She came.
She didn't even ask why.
The water cooked down. The rice swelled, soft and plump. Lena began to pour in the milk, a little at a time, slowly, from the heavy glass bottle, as the book instructed.
"Let it drink," she whispered.
"Is that in the book?"
"It's in the book."
"It's so strange."
"It isn't, really," said Lena. "I think it's, I think it's what you do with anything you love. You let it take what it needs."
Kara said nothing.
She just tightened her arm around her waist.
They stirred it for forty minutes.
It was the longest forty minutes of Lena's life. She had a wooden spoon in her hand, and a pot in front of her, and a slow, patient, ancient rhythm in her wrist. She stirred in a circle. In one direction. Round, and round, and round. The milk thickened. The rice turned from pearl to cream. The steam rose in soft, scented clouds, and filled the little kitchen with a smell like a hundred Sundays.
She was crying.
She did not try to stop. She stirred, and she wept, with the tears sliding unchecked down her cheeks, and dripping off her chin. And every time one began to shine, every time her throat tightened and her breath began to hitch, an arm came around her, strong and warm, and a pair of lips pressed softly to the top of her head.
"I'm here," said Kara.
"I know."
"Keep stirring."
"I am."
"You're doing so well."
"It's only rice," said Lena, in a thick voice.
"It's not only rice."
"No."
"It's your mother."
"Yes."
She leaned her head back, against Kara's shoulder, and shut her eyes, and went on stirring.
Somewhere around the thirtieth minute, Kara took the spoon.
She did it very gently, her hand closing over Lena's, and slid in behind her, so that her arms came around her waist, and her chin rested on her shoulder. They stirred together. One hand over another. One slow circle. Lena let go, a little, into the warmth of her. She felt her own pulse, and Kara's, and a steady quiet ticking of the old clock on the wall.
"Do you hear it?" she whispered.
"What?"
"The, the rhythm. It's the same. She's, I can feel it. Her hand, on mine." She laughed, shakily. "It's so stupid."
"It isn't."
"It's the same."
"I believe you," said Kara, softly.
They stirred.
And somewhere in the room, in the candlelit hush, in the smell of cinnamon and clove and rain, it seemed to both of them that a third pair of hands had joined their own, light and warm and patient, and a faint, contented, tuneless hum drifted through the dark.
At the fortieth minute, Lena stirred in the honey.
It ran out of the jar in a thick golden thread. It dissolved, slowly, into the cream. She added the pinch of salt, and tasted, and took a long, shaky breath.
She took the saucepan off the heat.
She fished out the cinnamon stick, with a pair of tongs. She fished out the clove, a little dark nail, swollen with milk. She held it in her palm for a moment, and looked at it.
It's for luck, said the book.
She put it in her pocket.
They served it in the good bowls.
There were only two. They were chipped, and old, and blue, with a little pattern of flowers around the rim, and they had been in the cupboard for twenty-two years. Lena washed them in the sink. She dried them on her sleeve. She ladled the pudding into each of them, in thick, creamy, steaming spoonfuls.
She dusted the tops with cinnamon.
It fell like a soft brown snow.
She carried them to the table, and set one in front of Kara, and sat down with the other, in the second chair. The candles were burning low. The light was gold, and soft, and a little unsteady. The kitchen had gone quiet.
"Well," said Kara.
"Well."
"Do you want to go first?"
"I'm, I think..." Lena stared at the bowl. Her hands were shaking. "I'm terrified."
"Of what?"
"That it won't be right."
"Then it won't be right."
"That I'll have done all this, and come all this way, and I'll taste it, and it'll be nothing, and I'll have..."
"Lena."
She looked up.
Kara was watching her, across the table, in the candlelight. Her face was soft. Her eyes were very blue. She had her spoon in one hand. She was smiling, very faintly, with a little wet shine at the corners.
"Even if it isn't," she said, "we made it together."
Lena's throat tightened.
She picked up the spoon.
She dipped it into the pudding, and lifted it, slowly, to her mouth. It was still warm. It smelled of cinnamon, and honey, and milk, and something underneath, deep and sweet and faintly spiced, like a hundred half-forgotten mornings.
She closed her eyes.
She tasted.
It was glory.
It was not the sweetness. It was not the rice, or the milk, or the honey, or the clove. It was something under all of them, something in them, something she could not name and had never been able to, and she knew it at once, with total certainty, the way you know a face.
It was love.
It was her mother's, in the stir of the spoon, and the patience of the pot, and the single clove. It was Kara's, in the arm around her waist, and the lips against her hair, and the long, silent, endless presence at her side. It was something else, too, something blurry, and warm, and unnamed, in the space between the two of them, a thing they had not yet said and did not need to.
It all came together in her mouth.
And she was seven.
She was seven years old, on a stool in a yellow kitchen, with her feet swinging and her mouth full of warm cream, and a woman at the stove was turning to look at her, with dark hair and gentle hands and a smile like the end of a long day. Well? she was saying. Is it right?
It's the best, whispered Lena, in the dark of her own head. It's the best, Mama.
I know, said the voice. I made it for you.
She was crying.
She was crying so hard that she could not swallow. It poured out of her, a long, wild, shaking, joyful flood. She put down the spoon. She put her hands over her face. Her shoulders heaved.
She was laughing, too.
"It's right," she gasped. "It's right. Kara, it's right. It's exactly, it's exactly..."
"I know," said Kara.
She was crying, too.
She had come around the table. She was kneeling on the floor, in front of Lena's chair, with her hands on her knees, and her face turned up, and tears streaming down it. She was grinning, and weeping, and shaking, all at once.
"I could tell," she said. "I could, I could feel it."
"How?"
"Your whole face changed."
"It's her," said Lena. "It's her. It's, I can taste her. It's the, it was never the sugar. It was never the rice. It was..."
"The love."
"The love."
She flung her arms around Kara's neck.
They held each other, on the dusty kitchen floor, among the candles and the steam and the smell of cinnamon, and wept, and laughed, and wept again. The pudding grew cold in its bowl. The clock ticked. And in the corner of the room, in the quiet, very faintly, a woman's tuneless, contented humming drifted through the dark and settled over them like a blessing.
----
The book went with them to National City.
It sat on Lena's nightstand, and then on her desk, and then in a small, glass-fronted case in the living room. She made the rice pudding on Sundays. She made it badly, at first, and then better, and then, one Sunday morning in spring, perfectly. She cooked from the other pages, too: the soda bread, the barmbrack, the lemon cake with the little drawn candle. She wrote notes in the margins. She added a second hand to the first.
Kara came every week.
She ate everything. She did the washing up. She read aloud, from the old notes, in her best and worst Irish accent, until Lena threw dishcloths at her. She learned to rinse the rice. She learned to wait. She learned, over the course of a long, slow, golden year, that there was a particular quiet in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon that she did not want to live without.
She did not say it.
Neither of them did.
They did not need to.
It was seven years before they told each other.
It was a very ordinary Sunday. It was raining. There was a pot on the stove, and a book propped against the sugar tin, and a smear of flour on Kara's cheek. Lena had turned from the counter, with a wooden spoon in her hand, and caught her looking, and said, without thinking, "What?"
"Nothing."
"You're doing a face."
"I'm not."
"You're staring."
"I just," said Kara, and stopped. Her ears had gone pink. "I think I want to be here. On Sundays. For, for a long time."
"How long?"
"I don't know."
"Roughly."
"Forever," said Kara, in a very small voice.
Lena put down the spoon.
She crossed the kitchen, with flour on her hands, and took Kara's face between her palms. She said nothing at all. She only looked at her, for a long moment, with her green eyes very bright, and then she kissed her.
It tasted, a little, of clove.
----
They fixed the house, in the end.
They did it slowly, over three summers, a window at a time. They replaced the roof. They tore out the brambles. They scrubbed the stove, and painted the walls yellow, and hung a blue teacup on a hook by the sink. A man from the village, the son of the hardware store man, came every Saturday with a toolbox and a flask of tea, and refused all payment but a bowl of pudding.
Kara was pregnant by then.
She was enormous, and radiant, and extremely bad-tempered about the stairs. She sat on a deck chair in the garden, in the shade of the great oak, with her feet up on a stool and a cup of tea balanced on her belly, and supervised. She gave advice. Most of it was ignored.
"You're doing it wrong," she called.
"I'm doing it beautifully."
"The nail's crooked."
"It's rustic."
"Lena."
"It's a design choice."
"It's a crooked nail," said Kara, serenely, and took a sip of tea.
Lena threw a hammer at her.
It was a gentle throw, and she missed deliberately. It landed in the grass, a foot away, and Kara, with enormous dignity, did not so much as flinch. She only raised an eyebrow, and went on drinking. Lena stood on the ladder, with her hair in a scarf and her hands full of tools, grinning, helplessly, down at the woman she loved.
I would do this forever, she thought.
I would do every single bit of it again.
They cooked from the book.
They made the soda bread, and the barmbrack, and the stew with the drawing of the pot. They made the lemon cake, for Lena's birthday, and Kara, who had not been allowed within six feet of the oven for months, cried, because it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. They made the rice pudding on the first night in the finished house, in the little yellow kitchen, with the stove lit and the windows open and the sound of the rain on the roof.
They ate it at the old oak table.
It was a good table. It had been scrubbed, and sanded, and oiled. It had two chairs, and a third, a new one, small and wooden, with a cushion on the seat, pulled up to the corner.
It was empty.
It would not be for long.
-----
She came in the winter.
She was small, and furious, and perfect, with a head of thick black hair and a pair of enormous, solemn, unmistakable green eyes. She had Lena's chin. She had Kara's smile. She had a grip on her mothers' fingers like a vise. She looked at the world, in her first hour, with an expression of deep and stern suspicion, as though she were not at all certain she approved.
They named her Elizabeth.
They called her Lizzie.
She grew, as children do, faster than anyone expected. She learned to crawl across the kitchen floor, and to pull herself upright on the leg of the table, and to say a long string of important-sounding syllables that nobody could understand. She learned to hold a spoon. She learned that the best thing in the world, the absolute best, came on Sunday afternoons, in a blue bowl, with a little dusting of cinnamon on top.
She sat in the third chair.
She was three years old, with a bib tied around her neck, and a wooden spoon clutched in her fist. She had a smear of cream on her cheek. She was swinging her feet, which did not reach the floor. She was looking at the bowl in front of her with an expression of deep, rapt, reverent hunger.
"Is it right, a stór?" said Lena, from across the table.
Lizzie tasted it.
She went completely still.
Her eyes went wide. Her mouth, with its single ring of cream, fell open. She stared at Lena, and then at Kara, and then, slowly, at the bowl, as though she had never seen anything so astonishing in all her life.
"It's the best," she whispered.
Lena put her hand over her mouth.
Across the table, Kara's eyes had filled.
"I know," said Lena, in a trembling voice. "I made it for you."
----
Many years later, the book sat on a shelf.
It was a different shelf, in a different house, a tall, crowded, cheerful one in the living room of a loud, busy, much-loved family home. It sat between a battered dictionary and a row of photograph albums. Its spine was cracked. Its pages were stained. It had been touched by four generations of hands, and carried through three countries, and added to, in the margins, in four different kinds of ink.
It had been Elizabeth's. Then Lena's. And then, quietly, on a night when she was twenty-two, it had passed to their daughter.
She made the rice pudding on Sundays.
She made it for her own table, in her own kitchen, with a long wooden spoon and a single clove. She had a small black-haired boy on the stool, with scabbed knees and a gap in his teeth. She stirred, slowly, in one direction. She hummed.
"Don't rush it," she said.
"Why not?"
"Because it's made with time."
"What happens if you rush?"
"It goes thin," said Lizzie, softly. "It forgets what it's for."
She held out a spoon.
He blew on it, with a very solemn face, and tasted.
And in a second house, a smaller one, by the sea, two very old women sat at a kitchen table.
They were gray, and stooped, and slow. One of them had a cane. The other had a pair of glasses on a chain. They had a bowl between them, a chipped blue one with a pattern of flowers, and in it, a little pale heap of rice pudding, dusted with cinnamon. They were not eating it.
They were watching a pair of children.
There were three of them. They were sitting on the floor of the kitchen, in a circle, with a big ceramic pot between them, and a long wooden spoon. They were taking turns. They were stirring, with great and fierce concentration, in the way that children do when they have been entrusted with something terribly important.
"Slowly," said the smallest.
"I'm going slowly!"
"You're going fast!"
"She said it doesn't like to be rushed!"
"It's a recipe," said the third, gravely. "It's a family one."
The old woman with the cane began to laugh.
She laughed until her shoulders shook. She put down her cup, and wiped her eyes with a lace handkerchief, and turned to the woman beside her.
"Do you remember," she said, "how it used to taste?"
"Like love," said the other.
"Like clove," said the first, with a sniff.
"Same thing."
"It is not."
"It is," said Kara, and reached across the table, and took her wife's hand.
It was thin, and spotted, and cool. It was the most beautiful hand she had ever seen. She held it, in the late gold light of the afternoon, with the children laughing on the floor and a faint, sweet smell of cinnamon rising from the stove.
"I love you," she said.
"I know."
"Forever."
"I know," said Lena, and squeezed.
On the bookshelf, in the living room, in the sun, the little green book stood quietly between its neighbors, and waited. There would be another Sunday. There would be another pot. There would be another small child, on another stool, with another spoon.
And in the middle of the final page, in a quick, slanted, long-ago hand, a single line, underlined twice, still read:
The secret isn't the clove.
It's the love.
Fin.