Family Lore

As Yadi continues to cook alongside Ant, she bites into a lime and remembers how she couldn’t stomach the flavor when she was young. Despite loving lemons, she could never eat limes, which her mother Pastora did not understand— especially since their family grew lime trees in the Dominican Republic. However, on the morning Mamá Silvia died, Yadi woke with an extreme craving for limes. As the family arranged to go back to the Dominican Republic for the funeral, she failed her classes and dropped out of school. With her new taste for limes (revealed to be a gift for adding either acidity or sweetness to conversations), she began to cook in earnest and built a career around vegan food. In the present, Ant tells Yadi how monochrome prison was, and how he found color in her graduation picture, sent by Pastora. When Yadi asks for the picture back because they don’t have a copy in her house, he takes his cue and leaves.

Flor attempts to write her own eulogy and struggles, as her understanding of life is grounded in a complicated form of love. She recalls her first love, Nazario, a distant cousin who visited when she was young.