What She Meant to Cook

The hair came away in my fingers—dark, coarse, still bearing the faint scent of her cheap coconut shampoo. Maya had stopped cutting it months ago, somewhere between the first diagnosis and the last hospital stay. She said if she was going to die, she'd do it with her witchy-black locks intact. The chemotherapy had other plans.

I knelt on her bedroom carpet, the dog—some beat-up terrier mix she'd rescued from a shelter three years ago—watching me with anxious eyes. His name was Barnaby and he'd been sleeping on her pillow since I brought him home yesterday. He hadn't eaten. Neither had I.

"You want to go out, buddy?" I asked, my voice cracking in the silence.

Barnaby thumped his tail once, weakly, and didn't move.

The apartment felt wrong without her. Maya had filled every corner with her chaotic collections—dried herbs hanging from doorframes, crystals on windowsills, books stacked in hazardous towers. Now it was just evidence of a life interrupted. I'd spent the past two days crying until my throat felt raw, then going through her things with the efficiency of someone who's terrified of stopping long enough to feel.

My stomach growled, reminding me I hadn't eaten since yesterday's funeral reception. I'd found myself eating three deviled eggs and staring at her mother's horrified face before realizing I'd lost my appetite somewhere between the eulogy and the casket lowering.

I made my way to the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed, that benign domestic sound that felt obscene in her empty apartment. Inside, among takeout containers and wilted produce, I found a plastic bag of organic spinach she'd bought four days before she died.

The receipt still sat on the counter: spinach, pine nuts, feta, lemons. She'd been planning to make that salad she loved, the one with the warm dressing. She'd been planning to be alive to eat it.

I stood there holding the bag of spinach, tears finally coming—really coming, not the polite weeping I'd done at the funeral. These were ugly, racking sobs that bent me double. I sank to her kitchen floor, the spinach pressed to my chest like something holy, Barnaby finally moving to lick the tears from my face.

"She was going to make dinner," I told him. "She was going to be here."

The dog whined and rested his head on my shoulder. Outside, the world kept turning, indifferent to the fact that my sister—the one who'd taught me to drive, who'd held my hand through our mother's funeral, who'd texted me every morning just to say she loved me—was gone. Just gone.

Eventually, I stood up. My legs were numb. The spinach was slightly crushed.

I found a pan. I toasted pine nuts in olive oil until they smelled like summer. I squeezed a lemon, crumbled feta, and wilted the spinach just the way she'd taught me—quick, over high heat, so it kept some of its bite. Barnaby sat at my feet, his tail thumping steadily now, catching a stray piece of spinach that fell to the floor.

I ate at her small kitchen table, fork scraping against the plate, eating every bite of what she meant to cook. It was the most bitter meal of my life, and the most necessary.