You are learning advanced modality: you will read the scene it happens in, learn 10 words and phrases, take apart the pattern behind them (advanced modal constructions: perfect and continuous modals), hear them in a conversation, rehearse them, and finish by saying one thing out loud to be graded.
Sylvia's Restaurant, Harlem, Sunday gospel brunch
The choir was already singing when we arrived at Sylvia's on Lenox Avenue. The line stretched past the stained glass window of the church next door. Someone must have told every tourist in Manhattan about this place — the wait was forty-five minutes.
But the food explained everything. The buffet stretched the length of the room: fried chicken, smothered pork chops, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, candied yams, cornbread. They must have been cooking since before dawn. The collard greens alone — deep green, silky, infused with smoked turkey — can't have been ready in less than four hours.
An older woman at the next table must have been coming here for decades. She knew every server by name. She could have been Sylvia's neighbor, her cousin, or simply a devoted regular. She leaned over and said, 'You should have gotten the smothered chicken. They might have run out by now.'
She was right. By noon, the smothered chicken was gone. I should have listened sooner. But the fried chicken was extraordinary — the crust must have been seasoned with something they don't publish in any cookbook. Some secrets must have been kept for a reason.