The food items had been on the counter since eight-fifteen.
Aurora looked at them, then at the clock on the kitchen wall, then back at the counter with the specific expression of someone who had made a plan and had allowed the morning to make a different plan on her behalf. The chicken thighs needed marinating. The plantains needed peeling. The rice needed at least forty minutes. Ricky would be here in twenty.
She had wanted him to walk in to something warm and ready—not because he had asked, not because he expected it, but because Ricky had spent the previous day driving between an old people's home where his father looked through him and a house in Virginia where his mother made everything feel manageable, and Aurora had decided, sometime around seven that morning, that he deserved to arrive somewhere that smelled like food.
