The cruelest thing about death is how it forces you to keep living in a world where the people you love most no longer exist. They vanish to a place you can’t reach and leave you with only their memories.
Exactly one year ago, Papi and I drove up the gravel driveway leading to Lala’s farm for the last time.
I distinctly remember the moment her old Victorian farmhouse came into view. My heart swelled with a rush of joy every time. There was something magical about the place, like those countryside manors in old movies. It had three floors full of various rooms that wove in and out of each other. A long wraparound porch with big, white columns greeted us as we approached.
Lala stood by the back door wearing one of her flowery dresses, waving as we pulled in and parked. On the days we visited, she always wore heels and red lipstick. She also had her hair and nails done at the salon.
I slid into her outstretched arms and pressed the side of my face against hers, taking in the scent of Maja soap on her skin. I already missed her smell, even though I had just arrived.
“Mi morenita. Que Dios y la Virgencita me la bendiga,” she said, blessing me in Spanish. She kissed me on the cheek, then rubbed off the lipstick smear with her thumb. “Let me look at you.” She pressed my shoulders back with both hands so she could get a full view of my face. “Mi niña bonita. Even more beautiful than last year.” She wrapped me in her arms again, kissing my cheek a second time. I hugged her back, not wanting to let go. When we finally released each other, she announced lunch was waiting for us in the kitchen.
Then she turned to Papi, kissing his cheek. “You look tired, mijo. Que te pasa?” She inspected his face, frowning as if she had found some terrible, unspoken news in his eyes.
“Hablamos después,” Papi muttered. Did he really think I didn’t know what that meant? Later, he told her, as in when Isa is not around.
We stepped inside her kitchen. Every smell in that room had a mouth-watering effect. Warm bread rolls rested in a basket on the farm table that served as an island. Pots of what I guessed were white rice and black beans lay covered on the six-burner stove, releasing the rich smell of cumin and oregano.
Papi and I exchanged a knowing smile. We were in for a treat.
Lala pulled a pan of slow-cooked pork butt out of the oven. My stomach growled the moment the smell hit my nostrils.
“This has to rest for thirty minutes,” she said.
Papi and I groaned.
“But I’m hungry now,” Papi whined, regressing a whole thirty years.
“Go take your things up to your room. Wash your hands. Everything will be ready when you come down,” she said, ushering us out of her kitchen.
We complained some more but eventually did as she said. We had woken up before dawn and headed to the airport, flown to Kansas City, then driven an hour to the farm. We were both tired and hungry, usually a bad combination for either of us.
My bedroom was on the second floor, a large room with big windows and baby-blue wallpaper painted with roses. It was dainty and unapologetically pastoral—completely at odds with my modern, all-white bedroom back in Chicago. But part of me longed for this room the rest of the year. The same part that missed its four-poster bed and the vase full of wildflowers sitting on the night table, next to a small jar of Vicks VapoRub that Lala used as a cure for pretty much everything.
In the city, sleeping with an open window wasn’t a choice. Too many ambulance sirens and cars honking. Here, the only sounds creeping through the open window were the chirping of crickets and the gurgling of a nearby stream.
But mostly, I missed waking up without an alarm and flowing through my days without having to follow a set schedule. Even though it always took me a few days to adjust to Lala’s slow-moving country lifestyle, when I finally fell into that easy rhythm of things I deeply enjoyed it. Here, we strolled through the fields, picked flowers, and took half a day to make one pie. Here, I had all the time in the world.
After I washed my face and hands, I returned downstairs. Lala had set up the dining room table complete with white linens and her best crystal and china. Papi sat in the head chair, where Grampa Roger used to sit. Lala and I sat next to him, across from each other. She passed the serving dishes brimming with glossy white rice, black beans in a thick sauce, croquetas de bacalao, the roasted pork she’d cooked for thirteen hours at low heat, fresh yeast rolls, and sweet plantains.
“Where did you get these?” Papi asked, taking six plantains all at once.
“I drove to the international food market. They have all sorts of things,” she said. “I even found some guavas,” she said to me. Her cascos de guayaba with cheese were a rare delight.
Before we ate, Lala thanked La Virgencita for our safe travel and for having us home with her. I was just thankful for the mountain of delicious food I was about to eat.
Every flavor at that table will forever be engraved in my mind. The smokiness of her pork, with its spicy burnt crust and meat so tender it fell apart on the first bite. The combination of garlic and cilantro she used in her beans, in a sauce so thick, it coated every grain of rice.
This was Lala’s best, the recipes she carried in her heart from Cuba. Those recipes survived a revolution and a lifetime of living in the rural Midwest. The city girl in me didn’t know which was worse.
“How are your cooking classes going?” she asked me, moving a few more plantains to my plate.
I shrugged. “They’re fine. I’m learning a lot of technique, I guess. But I already know most of that stuff. I’m ready for something more challenging.”
“We’ll play around with some recipes while you’re here, okay? I’m trying out a new strawberry-rhubarb pie for my friend, Pauline,” she said. “She loves my buttery crust.”
I later learned Pauline was one of Lala’s needle recipients.
“Can you make that Cuban cheese ball stuffed with meat before I leave?” Papi asked between bites.
“That’s a Puerto Rican thing, not Cuban,” Lala said. “A friend of mine in Miami gave me the recipe.”
“It could’ve come from Mars and I’d still eat a whole one by myself.” Papi chuckled, stabbing a piece of pork with his fork and taking it to his mouth.
“What is it?” I asked Lala.
“You hollow out an Edam cheese ball—you know, the one with the red wax around it?”
I nodded, picturing the cheese ball in my head.
“You hollow it and stuff it with minced meat. Then bake it until the cheese melts. Jaime loved it when he was a little boy.”
“I love it now! But you haven’t made it in years,” Papi said. He finished his first serving and moved in for seconds. Papi never ate this much back home. At Lala’s he ate like he was storing food for months or had a second stomach to fill.
“Fine, the next time I drive to the international market I’ll get the cheese ball,” she promised.
“Teach Isa how to make it,” Papi said. “No reason why I should only have it once a year.”
Lala and I both rolled our eyes at him.
“How is Adeline doing?” Lala asked, passing the bread basket around the table for a second time. “She hasn’t called me in a while.”
My eyes immediately turned to Papi, searching his face for a reaction. He cleared his throat and told Lala Mom was fine, which I knew was a big fat lie. Mom was far from fine. And I knew exactly why.
She had become quiet and withdrawn. She stopped playing her French music when she cooked—if she actually cooked. The weeks before had been a parade of takeout dinners.
Lala nodded, patting Papi’s hand on the table.
After we finished eating, we were so full we could barely move. But even in that state, we always found room for Lala’s dessert.
“For Jaime, apple pie,” she said, placing a pie dish on the table.
Papi rubbed his palms together, his face contorted into a goofy grin.
“Hope you have another one of these back there, because I’m not sharing,” he said, digging in.
Lala playfully smacked him on the shoulder.
“And for my Isabela, cascos de guayaba.” In front of me, she set a small dish with four guava shells preserved in syrup and three big slices of white cheese. And even though my pants were about to snap open, I was so full, I ate my entire dessert.
“I just got a new hammock in the back. It’s been waiting for you,” Lala told Papi.
He moved from the table to his favorite place in the garden, a spot where Grampa Roger had hung a hammock years ago so Lala had a place to read her romance novels outside. She would lie there for hours, rocking back and forth while holding a book titled something like Deseo Prohibido or Corazón Salvaje—always written in Spanish, always with a shirtless man on the cover.
Lala and I cleared the table and stacked the plates and pots inside her farmhouse sink.
“Lala, sit down,” I said. “I’ll do the dishes.” I knew she had probably been cooking up a storm since the crack of dawn.
“You want a cafecito?” she asked, reaching for her tartan thermos.
I nodded. I could never replicate the creamy texture of her coffee no matter how many times I tried. I was certain it had something to do with the old cloth strainer she used as a filter, or the way she heated the milk on the stove.
She poured the coffee into two porcelain cups.
“Remind me where your mother is again?”
I shrugged, not wanting to get into it. I couldn’t bring myself to speak about what I’d seen on the street that day between Dad and Margo.
“What’s going on?” she pressed.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to stay out of it.” I swallowed the knot in my throat. I wanted the image of them kissing deleted out of my brain. And I was so tired of keeping secrets. Most of the time, I felt like a traitor around my own mom.
“Sit with me for a moment, mijita,” she said, pulling out a stool for me. I sat next to her and took a sip of her coffee. The familiar flavor warmed my heart in ways I could never explain.
“I want to tell you something, nena. It may not mean much right now, but maybe later . . .” She paused to sip from her coffee cup. There was a stillness in the kitchen that served as a quiet prelude to her story.
“Before Castro came marching into Havana, I had all these things I wanted to do,” she recalled. “I had gotten my nursing degree—top of my class. I had my eye on a doctor at the hospital—very handsome man. He had a beard and broad shoulders, very, very handsome.” She grinned playfully, and I got a glimpse of the young woman I had seen in black-and-white photographs.
“I wanted to get married, have children, and live in one of those big houses in Miramar—by the beach—where I could wake up listening to the ocean every day. That was going to be my life. If someone had told me how things would actually turn out, I’d told them they were crazy. Me? Living on a farm in Kansas? Married to a gringo?” She laughed to herself. “I hate the cold. I’m still an island girl in here,” she said, touching her chest. “But life is like that, mija. You make all these plans, you have all these dreams, and things don’t always work out the way you planned.” She reached for my hand and held it in hers. Her paper-thin skin was soft and warm and somehow capable of passing on every bit of love she felt for me. “I want you to know this uncertainty is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes everything needs to fall apart so we can find the life we are meant to live. ¿Me entiendes?”
“Don’t you miss it though? Don’t you miss your life in Havana? Don’t you wonder sometimes what it could have been?”
“You can’t live in the past, Isa. If I had stayed, who knows what would’ve happened. I would’ve never met Roger. We would’ve never married. He would be married to some gringa instead. And Jaime would’ve never been born. Neither would you. And this moment, right now, would not exist. So I guess we can thank Castro for this.” She chuckled, squeezing my hand.
Back then, I couldn’t imagine a world without Lala. So yes, I was thankful for whatever confluence of events led to that precise moment in her kitchen.
“You have to open your heart, morenita. Open it big and wide for whatever comes, even the bad stuff. If you do that, I promise you will find your way. And when you look back, you will see it was a beautiful life. I promise.”
That was July. By the new year, the world somehow continued to turn without Lala. I tried to open my heart big and wide like she had said. But it was too much to take in, all at once. Instead, I hid in the kitchen where a recipe served as a clear step-by-step plan. In the kitchen, order always ruled over chaos—until it didn’t.