I was showing them that the gentleness they’d raised me with did not have to mean endless surrender, that you could be a kind person and still refuse to be eaten, and that watching it happen was allowed to feel as good as it felt.

My father reached over and squeezed my mother’s hand across the table, over the good china, and neither of them said anything, and it was the best moment of a terrible night.

When they finished, Wilhelmina brought her palm down flat on the table.

“This whole performance was designed to humiliate us.”

“What was humiliating,” Odalind said, “was telling my parents they could have half a cucumber for their anniversary.”

And then her father stood up.