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They headed off in the direction of the potatoes, dodging careening shopping carts and people arguing passionately about the difference between white and yellow onions. “How many do you think we need?” Shira asked once the mounds of delicious brown orbs were in sight.

“I don’t know, how many latkes per person? Three? Five?”

“Let’s say two, because making five hundred latkes sounds like the punishment some obscure Greek god might give you for overconfidence,” Shira said. “So…let’s google…” Her eyes nearly popped out of her head. “Sixty to seventy pounds of potatoes?” She blinked hard, as if trying to force her eyeballs back in. “Okay, maybe we can’t make our own latkes. Can we even carry sixty to seventy pounds of potatoes? Can we fit that in your car?”

But Leo was already shoveling up potatoes into his arms and piling them into their cart. “Google says that one potato weighs about one pound,” he said. “So that’s only sixty to seventy potatoes. Not bad.”

“I hope nobody else needs potatoes for the holiday. We’re about to clear out this store,” Shira said. She felt sorry for a second, then not. This was an emergency. A potato emergency. “My parents have matzah meal somewhere in the cabinet. Hopefully it’s not expired since it’s from Passover. I know they have eggs, too, and it looks like we don’t need too many for the recipe, but we should pick up a few onions.”

A few onions later, they were steering their cart toward the registers, where the lines were so long they merged into an amorphous blob that almost hit the aisles. They settled in for the long haul. “I’m hoping for a preview at this party, by the way,” Leo said. When Shira cocked her head, confused, he clarified. “Of your paintings. Which I’m told have already received a rapturous review from the New York Times art critic even though your show hasn’t happened yet?”

Shira groaned. “It’s not even fully painted yet.” At his questioning look, she elaborated. “I’m still working on my first show, with input from the gallery that’s representing me. Gallery representation is the first step, and once they’ve helped me refine and edit my vision into something that will hopefully sell, they’ll stage a big show that will ideally be a success, in that all the paintings sell and more people want to make shows of my work. They’re based on my childhood and my family.”

“So they’re paintings of me?” He smirked.

“No.” She rolled her eyes but not before that picture from earlier, the one she wanted to paint of him, flashed through her mind. A streak of yellow, that was what it needed. Yellow like sunlight, to keep it from being too dark. “This show is about the family side of my childhood, especially the parts involving my bubbe. The paintings are a little dreamlike, but they look at some of the stories she used to tell me and Talia and our cousins about the old country and her family’s journey to the US and how it parallels some of the issues American Jews face today.” She puffed out a breath. “Sorry, it’s hard to summarize it. I kind of babble.”

“No, it sounds amazing.” His eyes were sincere. “I would say I’d buy one, but I assume I wouldn’t be able to afford it. Is it your personal gallery that’s putting on the show?”

“Oh my god.” She rolled her eyes again, so hard they might roll right out of her head and be scooped up by someone searching for pearl onions. “Seriously, I don’t know if it’s just normal mom bragging or if this is some kind of delusion. Should I be looking for signs of early dementia?”

“I think your mom is just really proud of you,” he said. “Honestly, I haven’t seen you in eight years, and I’m really proud of you. I remember when you turned my upstairs hallway into an impromptu art gallery of your work.”

“An improvement,” Shira said.

“You taped your artwork over all my school pictures.”

“Like I said, an improvement.”

He gave her this crinkly-eyed, half-smiling look that made something in her chest leap. That wasn’t a look she remembered from her childhood. That look was all adult. All new. She said, hastily, “No, I mean, my job is really cool. It starts me on the track to owning my own gallery one day, if that’s what I want. I’ll make all the right connections.” She was quiet for a moment. “It’s funny, because that was the dream I never knew I had, while becoming a real artist is the one I’ve dreamed about for my whole life.”

“You’ve always liked art,” Leo said. “It makes sense that you’d want to go into the art world. Even in middle school you started that art club for the elementary school kids at the library, and you would put up their art for display in the halls like a gallery.”

Sure, but she hadn’t done that program because she’d loved fine art so much; she’d signed up because the junior honor society required volunteer hours, and then she’d kept doing it because all the volunteer hours looked good on her résumé. Still, she found herself nodding. “Right. Yeah.”

They finally stepped up to the front of the line. Leo put a divider on the register belt and began unloading their potatoes. “Anything we forgot?”

Yes. She let her eyes linger on him for a moment. Then looked away. “No, we’re good.”

They were not good. They were weak. That’s what Shira realized once they were back in her family’s kitchen, had finished unloading, and were beginning to make the latkes. Because the first step of making latkes was to shred your potatoes so that you could mix all your little potato bits up with the egg and matzah meal and salt, and it turned out that shredding seventy pounds of potatoes with the two semidull hand graters they’d dug up from the depths of her parents’ drawers required muscles not merely of steel but of diamond. Her biceps were already burning, and she’d shredded—she counted—all of two potatoes.

“Making latkes might be harder than I thought,” she said. She wished her parents and Talia were home to help—assuming they’d do anything but point and laugh—but she and Leo had returned home to find them all out. Maybe they’d sensed the potato-scented winds blowing their way. As she and Leo had stepped through the door, she’d gotten flashbacks of middle school, when they weren’t allowed to be alone together; if they went into one of their bedrooms, they had to leave the door open, and not just a crack. Now they were adults. No one could stop them.

Not that they’d be doing anything that required a closed door. They’d be getting sweaty, sure, but also covered in potato juice.

Leo was on his third potato, with no sign of slowing down. “You just need to focus on something other than the pain.”

She slumped in her kitchen chair. She wasn’t a huge cook, and neither were her parents, but she still always felt at home in the family kitchen; it was probably the cheeriest room in the house, with the wallpaper border of chickens going around the top of the room and her mom’s collection of vintage and thrifted chicken figurines sitting with pride of place in the china cabinet alongside the upside-down wineglasses and dusty spice collection. Maybe all that a room needed to make it cheery was chickens.

She doubted the room would feel this cheery if the chickens knew how many of their brethren had been nuggeted in that oven.

“How can I focus on anything else when my arm is about to fall off?” Shira said.

“One, think about how buff you’re going to be after this and how much fun you’ll have telling people that your epic arms aren’t due to the gym but to the potato challenge. You’ll start a new trend. The whole country will sell out of graters. People will write entire new cookbooks to use up all this newly shredded potato. Celebrities will thank you in their Oscar acceptance speeches. People will be clamoring for your new paintings but only if they follow a plucky new potato who wants to see the world. No, actually they’ll want that as a children’s picture book.”

“Parents are going to love the page where Spud the Plucky Potato gets shredded into tiny bits, screaming all the way.”

“And two,” Leo continued, ticking off a finger. “Play a game.”