He got her settled. He put the audiobook on her tablet and the big cushiony headphones over her braids, carefully, and the peas back on her cheek, and he went to the windowsill and moved the penguin snow globe a quarter inch so it was straight. Then he remembered the sack downstairs, the lighthouse in its dome of water, and he decided he would give it to her later, or tomorrow, or never, he did not know. It seemed impossible that he had bought it six hours ago and thought about it on the drive home as though it were the most important thing he had to give.
At the door she said, "Daddy."
He turned.
She had pushed one side of the headphones off her ear. "The dots are in pencil," she said. "So they won't come off. Don't let Mommy wipe them."
"I won't."
"Promise?"
"I promise," he said, and went down.
Noelle had not moved from the table, but she had done one thing while he was upstairs. She had taken the Smartwater bottle off the counter and the nearly empty wine bottle out of the refrigerator door and set them both on the table in front of her, side by side, labels facing out, like exhibits. Beside them she had set her phone, face up. And beside the phone, folded once, was a sheet of paper torn from the legal pad they kept in the junk drawer, the same legal pad on which, in July, she had drawn a line down the middle and written PROS and CONS.
He sat down across from her. He did not trust himself to do anything else.
"Is she okay?" Noelle said.
"No," he said. "She's not okay. You hit her in the face. She's got a mark from your hand on her cheek that's going to be a bruise by morning. She's upstairs listening to a book about octopuses with a bag of peas on her face, and she asked me to promise not to let you erase the dots." He heard his voice rising and pulled it back down by main force, for the girl at the top of the stairs. "She's not okay. But I don't think her cheekbone's broken, if that's what you're asking."