She took her hands down from her eyes and looked at her husband, and she thought: you don't know. You've never been awake for it. You've never seen the way he sits there.
She didn't say it. She said, "Maybe," and got up to do the dishes, and she heard the paper rustle open behind her.
* * *
That Saturday was the day of the Ding Dongs.
Janet kept a box of them on the top shelf of the pantry, behind the oatmeal, where Del supposedly didn't know about them. It was her one vice. She worked twelve-hour shifts on her feet on a medical-surgical floor where people threw up on her and cried on her and occasionally died in front of her, and if she wanted to come home and eat one chocolate-covered hockey puck wrapped in foil while Wheel of Fortune was on, that was nobody's business.
The box had held eight on Monday. She'd eaten one Monday and one Wednesday. It had six left.
It had two.
She stood in the pantry with the box in her hand and counted again, the way she counted narcotics at the end of a shift. Two. She looked behind the oatmeal. She looked behind the Bisquick. She found the foil wrapper from one of them, balled up small, wedged down in the gap between the shelf and the wall.
Del was in the garage, putting the storm windows in for winter. She carried the box out there and held it up.
"Delbert Pruitt."
He was on the stepladder with a storm window in his hands, and he looked down at her over his shoulder. "What?"
"You know what."
"I really don't."
"Four of my Ding Dongs. In five days. And you hid the wrapper."
He climbed down the ladder, set the window carefully against the workbench, wiped his hands on his jeans. "Jan. I haven't touched your Ding Dongs."
"Dr. Kessler told you two hundred and sixty. He told you that number in August and you came home and you told me and you said you were going to be good."
"I have been good."