It’s mid-May, and I’ve just finished a list of what I’ve managed to cook during quarantine—from salted pistachio brittle to lamb stock from one Easter bone—when my former boss Kathy sends me a Facebook message. “Did you hear the news?” she asks.

I hadn’t. Her deli was closing.

Seventeen years ago, I was among Kathy’s Deli’s very first employees in Shippensburg, a small town in south central Pennsylvania. A high school senior, I worked Thursday nights, spreading mayo to the exact edges of hoagie rolls and moving from sandwich bar to slicer, to the rhythm of the customers’ requests. When I graduated, somebody took my picture, slender and serious, next to the deli sign on West King Street. I remember smiling self-consciously at the passing cars, thinking more about the fruit trays that I had to assemble than my upcoming time as a creative writing major at Susquehanna U.

Over the next seven years, the deli’s popularity expanded like rising dough, and I left the work and returned more times than I could count. There were the heat-soaked summers during college, the winter breaks with holiday platters piled higher than I could reach in the walk-in. After a year of teaching English in France, I returned to Kathy’s, where my bright-eyed boyfriend—now my partner of 16 years—visited me in the mornings as I Windexed the cold food cases.

Over time, I mastered how to hold a knife, to move swiftly in a crowded kitchen, to measure cheese by eyesight. I attended more weddings as a caterer than as a guest, more graduation parties for friends I’d never know, and more corporate meetings as a temporary interruption: the weary worker who slips in with chafing racks by the back door.

“It’s time,” Kathy says over the phone, and I understand. But the announcement swells inside me like a sudden fever. The deli’s closing is my first loss to the coronavirus.

My growing up had taken place at Kathy’s in the stories that cooks handed off like sheet pans. I was told that in life you make decisions that eventually make you. That strong-willed women are less respected than strong-willed men. In the hot, crowded kitchen next to the three-bay sink, none of us were thinking about a global pandemic, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, or the 2020 presidential race.

But somehow, with the magical intuition unique to small-town cooks, maybe we should have seen it all coming? Probably not.