The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,15

more? Elena was right between Isobel and Margaret, technically her aunties, one six months younger, one a year older. They all shared a room with a sister two years older, Dorothy, who hated Elena and never did warm up.

All she had with her were the clothes she’d worn, a pair of extra underwear, and a Victoria Holt book her grandmother had been reading when she died, The Mistress of Mellyn, which Elena was ashamed to have stolen from the library. She had never lived anywhere but the little apartment near the restaurant.

That was the beginning of Elena’s betweenness. Between the world of white and Spanish, as they said in those days, not Mexican, which meant something else. Spanish, to differentiate from Indian, which is what some white people wanted to be elsewhere, but not in New Mexico, where Spanish ruled. Spanish the language. Spanish the colors. Spanish the food. Spanish the music and the dances at the VFW. Spanish the customs. Spanish the everything.

Every night, Elena curled around the book and buried her face in a blanket and cried silently. It was like she had a hole in her heart, or maybe even worse, like there was a hole in her chest where everything she loved had been cut out. She couldn’t breathe with it.

There were two points of light. One was Isobel, so close to Elena in age that they were nearly twins, their birthdays exactly six months to the day apart. Isobel, the youngest girl, made room for Elena, pushing her socks and underwear to one side in a drawer so Elena could put in her meager belongings, shoving chairs around at the dinner table so Elena could sit beside her.

Elena was smitten with Isobel and her shiny hair and her curvy mouth and her big teeth, coming in with their little ragged edges. She had a big, loud belly laugh and she liked blue fingernails and she was always getting in trouble for something. They slept in the same bed, were in the same class at school, wore each other’s clothes. At night, when Elena wept in homesickness, Isobel just curled up next to her and smoothed her hair, murmuring Spanish words of comfort: Sleep, little child. You’re safe now. Words Elena didn’t understand at the time.

The other joy was Mama, Maria Elena, who wrapped her namesake in worn thin cotton aprons and stood the little girl on a chair next to her while she cooked for the multitudes. She told Elena to call her Mama. She showed her how to measure flour and pat out tortillas and stir a pot of stew. And there, again, Elena was safe.

What else could she have done with her life but cook?

At the supermarket in Aspen, Elena simply walked the perimeter at first, to check out the layout. It was predictably big and bright and clean, with all the accoutrements of a high-end grocery—a stunning bakery, acres of deli offerings, and a produce aisle with piles of the very freshest arugula and purple fingerling potatoes and grapes the size of her palm.

But to her surprise, she also found an aisle bursting with a plentiful display of Mexican ingredients—dried red chiles of many varieties, big and small; canned and pickled green chiles; masa and corn husks and spices and almost any other staple a person would need. It seemed bizarre that such a wealth enclave should have such good Mexican supplies, until she spied a short dark man in a plaid shirt and jeans weighing a plump package of chicken.

Of course. Such a heavy tourist market would require huge crews of construction workers, cleaners, cooks, gardeners, labor that would be supplied by Latin American immigrants in all their forms—legal, green-card, and not.

Standing there in that shiny aisle, with rock classics playing over the speakers, she realized she was going to live closer to home than she had in almost twenty years. The snake of history on her back burned for one long minute, as if it were uncoiling into a live being, a whip of white and orange light. Standing there in the brightly lit grocery store with a vastness of homey foods to choose from, Elena felt suddenly hollow, terrified, and she wondered if this was a mistake, to come too close to home.

“Just cook, Elena,” said Isobel, standing by the chiles, her arms slim and young. “Just make the soup.”

“I have to cook for Julian tomorrow night.” Elena looked over her shoulder. There was no one in the aisle.