When the Moon was Ours(49)

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Miel,” he said, and heat pinched the wound where her roses burst from her skin. “Miel, please say something.”

She needed to think about Sam’s hair and skin, instead of the deep colors of that stained glass.

She needed to think of Aracely’s soft gold hair instead of the brazen yellows of those trees.

She needed to think of her father’s hands cutting a length of bandage, and not her wondering about where he’d gone, the hesitation that tinged her memories of him. She needed to remember her mother’s laugh instead of her screaming, her soft voice instead of the rush of water over stones in a drought-stripped river.

That last one, her mother’s laugh and voice, sparked a memory so strong Miel felt the air around her turning, everything becoming the flowered wallpaper of her mother’s kitchen. She remembered the pattern even better than her mother’s face, the flowers that must once have been yellow but that had faded to cream. That kitchen had held more of her mother’s laughter than anywhere else in the world. It was where her mother sugared violet petals with fingers as skilled as a silversmith’s. She added cinnamon and cayenne to mole. She let Miel and Leandro cover their hands in flour and powdered sugar when they made alfajores, the shortbread they spread with dulce de leche.

Finding that memory was as bright as catching trees bursting into bloom. It was a memory from when Miel was barely old enough to make them. After that, she would turn three, and four, and the roses would come, and they would take everything. But she could hold on to this, her hands and Leandro’s pale with sugar and flour.

Alfajores de nieve, coated in powdered sugar so each looked made of winter.

She didn’t have Leandro anymore, or his hands, smooth and dark as finished wood. But she had Sam, this boy, and his brown hands.

Miel pulled her eyes from the knotted carpet, and looked up at Sam. “I think I am hungry.”

“Yeah?” Sam’s smile was slight, but without caution. “Anything in particular?”

Miel pushed herself up on her hands, her body stiff as if she’d slept on it wrong. “Have I ever shown you how to make alfajores?”

The way his smile shifted, she knew he didn’t know the word. He probably thought she’d made it up, like one of her stories about stars. He’d had the alfajores she and Aracely made and brought over on New Year’s Eve. But they’d never made them together, not like she’d shown him how to make recado rojo from achiote seeds and cloves and a dozen other spices. He didn’t even recognize the name alfajor.

She slid off the sofa, and the air felt thin and yielding, like she’d been walking in waist-deep water and now crossed dry ground.

She and Sam both knew where to find anything in each other’s houses. He knew how Aracely arranged her spice cabinet. Miel knew the patch of the side garden where Sam’s mother let borraja grow wild, the starflowers blooming pink and then turning deep blue. She picked handfuls, and hundreds of five-pointed blossoms still brightened the green leaves and wine-colored buds, covered in what looked like a coat of white down.

Sam followed her like they were dancing and she was leading him. He held the starflowers in his hands, and brought them inside with her. She pulled down flour, and he brought out the eggs. She looked for milk, and he set out the vanilla.

They washed the borraja flowers, patted them dry, brushed them with egg white and covered them in sugar. They mixed butter and flour until it formed into dough, soft and pale.

“What were you doing out there?” Miel asked, adding cinnamon and ground cloves like her mother had, not just to the dulce de leche but right into the dough. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”

Sam worked in the dark threads of spice with the heels of his hands. “Woods sent me home.”

“For what?” she asked.

He cringed, his shoulders rising. “I might’ve gotten into a fight.”

“With who?” she asked.

“Does it matter?”

She touched the candied borraja flowers, checking if they’d dried. The sugar gave the pink and indigo petals the look of unpolished crystal.

“What were you fighting about?” she asked.

“Forget it.” Sam folded the dough over onto itself. “Point is, I’m supposed to be cooling down.”

Miel stirred the sugar and milk on the stove. It started off pale as the moon, and the longer they let it cook the darker it turned, deepening to gold and then amber. Aracely let hers cook for hours, until it was brown as hazelnuts.

Now heated, it let off the scent of the vanilla seeds she’d scraped into the pot, warm and sweet. She couldn’t remember if it had been Sam’s mother or Aracely who’d first taught her how to slit open a vanilla bean. It hadn’t been her own mother. She’d been too young to hold the knife.

Miel’s thoughts had barely flitted toward Sam’s mother when they landed on three words, said in her voice. He’ll get there. Those words had done nothing but frustrate Miel. His mother’s calm and patience had not made her calm and patient. They’d made her unsettled, more in a hurry for Sam to see that bacha posh were not words that would make him something other than what he was. They were not a spell in a fairy tale. They would not make him want to be a girl once he was old enough to be a woman.

He’ll get there. Miel could still remember his mother’s face when she said those words, her pale, dark-lined eyes full of a concern that was more care than worry.