But she could stand me at the counter every evening and put her impatient hands over my clumsy ones on the rolling pin and say “no, like this, you’re working it too hard, biscuits know when you don’t trust them,” and mean, underneath it, all the warmer things.

I learned to read the translation. You’re working it too hard meant slow down, you’re safe here. The whole grammar of that kitchen was love disguised as instruction, and I had been starving for exactly that grammar my whole life without a name for the hunger, and here it was, ladled out nightly across Albert’s old place at the table, by a sharp old woman who would have died before she called it what it was.

I just showed up at the counter every evening and learned.

And Albert’s kitchen, which had gone quiet for four years, filled up again, a little, with the sound of two people cooking.