I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this a criticism of my mother, and it is the opposite.

Rhonda worked doubles so that I could eat at all; the drive-through was love, was a tired woman making sure her kid was fed on the eleven minutes she had between shifts, and I will not let anyone, including my younger resentful self, turn her exhaustion into a failing.

But there is a kind of nourishment that requires time nobody in my childhood had, and I had grown up without it and without knowing I’d grown up without it — the nourishment of the unhurried table, of food made slowly on purpose, of a person standing at a stove not because the family had to eat but because feeding you was how she said the things she couldn’t say.

Enid could not say I have come to care about you. It was not in her vocabulary; the taped rules and the border-guard questions were the far edge of what she could manage out loud.