By Ariel Barley

I find myself craving breakfast.

A woman is pregnant, and she is hungry.

She drags herself out of bed, unhooking her CPAP machine and breathing in cool air. Her husband is dead asleep, so as she slips into her stylish cardigan, she is careful not to wake him. The cardigan cinches in the front with a wide gold buckle, and it droops low enough to cover her baby bump. She looks like a rose, just upside-down and grunting with the force of walking. It hurts now, at seven months.

She does walk, though. She walks all three blocks to El Rincon, just as she has every Sunday since she moved to Texas.

(Before she was pregnant, it would take her five minutes. Now, it takes her eleven — and she stops midway through to pet the Whitworths’ big grey dog who seems to want her baby for breakfast. He licks and licks at her stomach, leaving behind a wet patch on her cardigan.)

El Rincon greets her at the end of her walk, as old and charming as it was last week. She dings the door open.

A painting of a shut-eyed lady in a white tutu hangs in the entryway; she poises delicate hands out, welcoming customers to a tiled bowl of melted peppermints. The woman grabs two, crunching them between her teeth.

Her waitress greets her in Spanish, with a hug. “The usual?”

“No,” the pregnant woman says, tottering to her usual table. “This baby wants a taco.”

At the end of her three tacos on flour tortillas, the pregnant woman rubs her stomach. She draws little swirls and hearts with her swollen fingertips.

This is just what she needed: a table for two.

I am a fetus receiving these swirls and hearts (and these tacos) with my curled-up body, but I am not hungry — not yet.


My dad teaches me how to scramble an egg when I am ten.

He sprays the pan and cracks the egg as he listens to some Bible study, holding the spatula in his other hand. He lets the eggs burn in places, and sometimes, he throws spinach and broccoli onto them, letting everything fuse together into one big “frankenegg.” He tells me about protein, which ten-year-old me does not really care about. He talks about nutritional value — about vitamins, and minerals, and how five eggs are the way to start a morning. I let him, because even then, I know that my dad likes to feel like he’s teaching me something.

We gather at our tiny table with paper plates and lukewarm bottles of water. My dad throws the eggs onto those HEB tortillas that we never seem to run out of. He prays (“bless this food and also my daughter”) and chews with his mouth open. Crumbs fall into his beard. I wonder if I could pull a meal out of it — or a hamster, or a conversation.

The meal is okay, and — like usual — we don’t talk much. I miss sugary cereal, but my dad made this meal, and he smiles at me — or maybe at my nutritional value, which goes up with each quiet bite.


Cecily presses dough on our counter. Her fingers are powdery, and long, and manicured (“roseprick” — my mom’s old nail polish that’s a pretty mauve.) She kneads and kneads until there is a tall stack of tortillas on the kitchen island. I have never made tortillas before, so I watch.

“Take one,” she begs me. “Please take one. I can’t eat these all alone.”

Later — at dinnertime, after my third tortilla — she tells me that my day’s fortune costs an egg; she heard this from a friend, or maybe one of her cousins.

She mimes cracking an egg on her knee. “You crack an egg before bed. Like, right before bed. If the yolk is damaged, then your fortune is bad.”

“That’s stupid,” I tell her, flour on my lips.

But later, I take an egg just to see. Cecily laughs loudly at something in the living room. She sounds like a baby seal. My other roommates, Behr and Garrett, have started clanking about in the kitchen.

(On our living room table, along with the tortillas: six peanut butter cup wrappers, edible cookie dough, a homemade game of Guess Who, batteries, a scrapbook, a drawing of the woman who terrorized me at work last week, two hot cocoa mugs, two tea mugs.)

My yolk comes out perfect; I feel stupid for needing its validation.


Garrett buys me something small for Christmas: a silver bottle of wine shaped like a cat. He uncorks it for me, we drink it in an hour, and the cat becomes another trinket-pet on our trinket-shelf. It is something like a vodka graveyard, but more classy, and it’s around then that Garrett starts making me dinner.

He likes salmon, and chicken, and edamame, and making everything a little bit spicy. He learns, somewhere along the line, how much I love breakfast. He’ll make eggs and douse them in cholula — and then he’ll set some aside for me to pick at. He buys me my favorite chips when he runs to the store. He tells me that providing makes him happy. I try to imagine this: giving so easily, so thoughtlessly.

“It’s your love language!” I decide, because I like to label. “And you make the best eggs.”

“Well, there’s a trick.”

Garrett teaches me how to scramble an egg when I am twenty (whisked in a mug, with water poured in.) Right before, he asks: “Can I make you dinner?”


I drive home, because it’s a really bad week, and my mom takes me wordlessly to El Rincon.

I sob ugly about friends — or maybe my no-longer-relationship, or maybe that I think my hair is dumb. Everyone is looking at me; I can tell. The bartender, the waitress, the obnoxious family that brought their seven kids — everyone. My mom is looking at me the hardest, as if she wants to wrap me snug in a blanket, or her chiffon blouse. She listens, waving her fork as I lament my woes.

“What do I do?” I warble, feeling so, so sorry for myself. “How do I fix things?”

“You need to eat,” my mom says, scooping scrambled eggs from her plate to mine. They fall so easy on my tortilla. “You need to eat well.” ■