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“Hey, look at me.” Kia tipped Sullivan’s chin up and looked her in the eye. “You’re fighting all that with Mirepoix.”

“Sometimes I think I’m just trying to make myself feel less guilty.

” Sullivan’s shoulders slumped as she exhaled a long sigh.

“Mirepoix costs forty dollars a plate. Yeah, we’re carbon neutral, but we only serve fifty people a night, if that.

” Sullivan’s eyebrows furrowed. “It’s not enough. Sorry. That was heavy.”

Kia gently rubbed Sullivan’s back.

“You get to be heavy if you want.”

Sullivan covered Kia’s hand with hers in an absent-minded way.

“Do you want kids, wife of mine? The banana slugs make it work. I don’t see why we couldn’t impregnate each other with the penises that we’ll grow out of our heads. Right side only. It’s always the right side.”

Kia tried to laugh. “I don’t want you to chew off my head penis.” She still felt heavy. “I don’t want kids.”

“Why not?” Sullivan threaded her fingers through Kia’s.

“I live in an RV. At least my dad had drag queens to tutor me. I’d have to teach them everything. And there’s the environment, like you said.”

Sullivan looked surprised.

“I’ve always tried to put it out of my mind.

When I lived on my dad’s yacht, we sailed to places that weren’t touched by pollution.

I mean, of course, they were , but they were places where you didn’t see it, places that had been cleaned up, like Boston Harbor, or places where people kept things clean for the tourists, like Cabo.

And since my dad sailed more than he ran the engines, it felt like we weren’t hurting anything.

But I know my food truck is part of the problem.

You’re right about the forks. We go through thousands. ”

“You’re trying to help people.”

“What good is it if there’s no planet to live on?”

“There’s hope,” Sullivan said emphatically.

“You just said you felt like you weren’t doing anything, and you’re more environmentally conscious than anyone I know.”

Kia nestled closer to Sullivan. The sunshine on Kia’s face was warm, but the air was cooling. She felt Sullivan release a long breath.

“I’m just one person. If I were the only one trying to make a difference, it wouldn’t matter at all, but there are people protecting the Amazon rainforest. There’s a Kenyan woman turning plastic into bricks for building.

Mushroom farmers making cloth out of fungus in petri dishes.

There’s a fair outside of Eugene where the vendors, restaurants, and a lot of performance spaces are built into a forest. There, people and nature and business are symbiotic.

Once a year. For a few days a year, like magic, this model of how we could live if we really tried.

If you’re in Oregon in July, I’ll take you.

It’s kind of like a food truck pod. Lots of small vendors. No big, established buildings.”

“Maybe it should be more than once a year.” Kia scooched forward on the boulder so she could look at Sullivan. “We could…” Kia began. “With what you know about sustainable cooking and my food pod…”

Sullivan’s eyes lit up. Her body filled with energy. She was waiting, breathless, for Kia to say what Sullivan herself was obviously thinking.

“We could expand the Country Fair model,” Sullivan jumped in. “We could prove that you can run food trucks sustainably and help the people you want to help.”

“Minority communities get left out of environmental activism. A lot of the chefs I’ve invited are coming from places with industrial pollution, like cancer alley in St. James Parish in Louisiana.

They want a better environment for their kids.

They know their towns have higher rates of everything bad. ”

“We could have community gardens, teach about small-scale food production. Camps for kids,” Sullivan said.

“Some sort of shared plate and fork dishwashing so no one has to use disposables.”

“It’d be beautiful too. There are lots of food trucks in Portland, but this would be better than eating in a parking lot. This would be a place to be more… alive, more in nature, to feed your soul too.”

“I could teach the food trucks I visit around the country how to use our practices.”

“Maybe there’s money out there to help people install solar panels,” Sullivan said.

“I opposed the sale of the Bois because I wanted my nonprofit to buy it, but, realistically, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t have raised the money in time, and the association would have sold it to a developer anyway.

And who knows… maybe, long shot of all long shots, maybe some of it will rub off on Mega Eats or another company like that.

Maybe we’ll do something that makes them see they can make money and waste less of our planet.

Wait, look! It just caught a fish.” Sullivan motioned to the creek.

Kia turned. A tall bird stood in the water gulping something down its long neck.

“I see it.”

When she looked through the binoculars, it felt like the bird was watching her back.

“If we did do something together, you could put it all on your socials,” Sullivan said. “It’ll be like a home renovation show meets a nature show meets a cooking show.”

Kia laughed. “Do I have to? Can’t I get off social media?”

“It’s your job.”

Kia handed the binoculars back to Sullivan, sitting close to her again, as though they could share the binoculars like sharing earbuds. Sullivan admired the bird.

“Hello, you fine fellow,” she said. “Would you like to get gourmazed?”

“You make it sound like I’m going to eat him. Wait, do we have to go vegan?”

“It’s a responsible choice, but we could do what I do now and buy sustainably and humanely raised meat. I know it’s a big pivot. And you don’t have to make my thing be your thing. That wasn’t the deal.”

Kia leaned toward Sullivan and whispered in her ear, “Neither was living with you or having sex with you.” It felt so easy to be with Sullivan.

She’d stopped worrying about whether her flirting was perfect.

She could be totally herself. Maybe she’d take a picture of herself and Sullivan on her digital camera.

Those pictures were always taken alone, and it was wonderful to be herself around another person.

Being authentically yourself made it easier to dream.

Challenges that would have seemed insurmountable or worries—like the lawsuit—that would have devastated her before felt manageable.

Maybe it was because being with Sullivan reminded Kia that Kia was herself, no matter what happened. No one could take that away from her.

“Maybe I’ll be an environmentalist influencer,” Sullivan said. “Did you know that the blue heron’s eyes turn red during mating season?”

Did you know I love you? Kia looked at Sullivan and tried to press the words into Sullivan’s mind. Love me back.