"Then who ate them? Milo?"
Something went across Del's face then, fast, like a shadow of a bird crossing a yard. She saw it and didn't know what it was. Then it was gone, and he was just Del again, mild and patient and maddening.
"Maybe you ate them and forgot," he said. "You've been tired."
It was the wrong thing to say. He seemed to know it as soon as it was out of his mouth. Janet felt her face go hot, felt all the sleepless nights rise up in her at once like a flock of starlings off a wire.
"I'm tired," she said, "because nobody in this house will listen to me."
She went back inside and slammed the door between the kitchen and the garage, which was a hollow-core door and didn't slam very satisfyingly, and she stood in the kitchen and ate one of the two remaining Ding Dongs standing up, angrily, in four bites, and then felt worse.
Through the door she heard the ladder creak as he went back up it. She heard him working. After a while she heard him stop working, and there was a long silence, and she thought maybe he'd come in and say something real, something more than mm. But he didn't come in. Eventually the ladder creaked again.
* * *
It wasn't just the Ding Dongs.
Once she started counting, she couldn't stop. That was the trouble with being a nurse; the habit got into you. There was a half a loaf of Wonder bread on Thursday and only the heels of it by Sunday, and she didn't eat white bread and Del only ate it for his lunch sandwiches, which he made Sunday nights for the whole week, bologna and Miracle Whip, five of them lined up in waxed paper in the refrigerator like soldiers. The Tupperware of leftover chili she'd been saving for Monday was in the sink, rinsed out—rinsed out—and put on the drainer upside down.
Del rinsed things now. Del put them upside down.
She said nothing about the chili. She lay in bed on Sunday night with her back to him and thought about Dr. Kessler's office, the paper crinkling under Del as he sat on the exam table in his undershirt, his big hands on his knees. Two hundred and sixty, the doctor had said, and patted a chart, and told them about margarine.
And now, apparently, he was eating cold chili in the dark like a teenager.
She thought: is this what it's going to be? You hide your food and I hide my food and we lie here back to back.
She thought: he'd tell me if something was wrong. Wouldn't he?
At 2:30 Milo stood on her chest.
This time she didn't push him off. She lay still under the soft weight of him and looked into his eyes, round and black in the dark, with only a thin ring of green around the pupils.