She nodded. He laid it against her cheek as gently as he had ever done anything. She flinched, just slightly, from the cold, and then leaned into it, and he held it there, and with his other hand he turned on the lamp on her nightstand so he could see.
He was not a doctor, but he looked at her face in the lamplight with the peas held away for a moment and made himself be calm and careful about it. The red was across her cheekbone and down toward her jaw. It was hot to the touch. The skin wasn't broken. Her eye looked all right, the white of it clear, and when he asked her to look up and down and side to side she did it without wincing. Her teeth were fine, she said, and showed him, baring them like a small dog. Her ear didn't ring. Her head didn't hurt except where it hurt.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. I think it's going to be a bruise. I think it's going to be sore. If it gets worse, or if your head starts hurting, or your eye, you tell me right away and we'll go see somebody. All right?"
"Okay."
"You're not in trouble."
She looked at him over the peas.
"I need you to hear that one first," he said. "Before anything. You're not in trouble. Not even a little."
"I hid Mommy's keys."
"I know."
"In the spinach."
"I saw. That was a very good hiding place." He found, impossibly, that he was almost smiling. "Nobody in this family has opened that drawer since August."