He was an electrician. He had his own small business, Whitley Electric, one truck and one part-time apprentice, and for most of the last two years he had worked as many hours as there were in the day, because work was the only thing that made the silence in the house bearable. Elena had died of a brain aneurysm on a Tuesday afternoon in the produce section of the Giant Eagle, at thirty-eight years old, between one breath and the next. No warning. No goodbye. She had been holding a bag of clementines. Nora had been nine.
They had not done well, the two of them, in the time since. Sam knew that. He had been a good father before, he thought, when there were two of them and he could be the fun one, the one who did piggyback rides and bad pancakes on Saturday and checked under the bed for monsters at night with exaggerated thoroughness while Nora shrieked with laughter. He had not known how to be the only one. He had not known how to be the one who noticed when she stopped eating, or when she stopped talking about her friends, or when she started spending hours alone in her room with the door shut. Her teachers had noticed. The school counselor had called twice. He had said all the right things on the phone and then gone back to work, because work was something he knew how to fix.
In September, after the second call, something had finally gotten through to him. He had cut back. He had stopped taking the emergency night jobs, stopped working Saturdays. He had started picking Nora up from school himself and making dinner every night, real dinner, even if it was only spaghetti, and sitting across from her at the table while she pushed it around her plate. It had not fixed anything. But it had been a start, and in October she had laughed at something he said, really laughed, for the first time in he didn't know how long, and he had had to go into the bathroom afterward and sit on the edge of the tub for a while.
And now this. The peanut butter. The blanket. The batteries. The gray, sleepless face at breakfast.
He thought about drugs, because every parent of an eleven-year-old who reads the news thinks about drugs, and dismissed it. He thought about a boy, and felt sick, and dismissed that too, mostly. He thought about the possibility that she was hiding food in her room, hoarding it, the way the grief books he had finally started reading said some children did. He checked her room one Saturday while she was at the library and found nothing. No hidden food. No wrappers. Just her books and her sketchbooks and the framed photograph of Elena on her nightstand, and, tacked to the wall above her desk, a new drawing he had never seen before.