"Please," she said. "Please. I'll tell you everything. I swear to God I'll tell you everything. Just not in front of her. She's had—" Her voice broke, finally, all the way. "She's had enough of me today."
He looked down at his daughter, who was standing beside the open refrigerator in her bare feet with the cold pouring out around her ankles and her cheek going from red to a darker, angrier color at the edges. She was watching him. She was watching him the way you watch the face of a doctor when he looks at the X-ray. Waiting to see what kind of news it is.
He closed the refrigerator door. He did it slowly. The seal took hold with its soft rubber kiss and the light went off inside and the hum came back up, steady, indifferent. He thought, absurdly, that the left door gasket was going and he would have to replace it, he could hear it in the seal, and then he thought that he could hear a failing door gasket from across a commercial kitchen, he had made a career out of hearing things like that, and he had not heard this. He had stood in this kitchen every weekend for three weeks. He had kissed his wife. He had opened this door a hundred times for milk and leftovers and beer, his own beer, with the bottle right there in the door, and he had not seen it.
He bent and picked Linnea up. She was seven and getting long and it had been months since he had carried her anywhere, and she was heavier than he expected, all elbows and knees, but she put her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and held on as though she were much smaller, and pressed the undamaged side of her face into his collar.
"I'm going to take her upstairs," he said. "I'm going to look at her face. And then I'm going to come back down."
"Okay," Noelle said.
"Don't go anywhere."
She laughed, a terrible small sound, and looked at the refrigerator. "I can't," she said. "She hid my keys."
He opened the freezer on the way past and took out a bag of frozen peas and carried his daughter out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
Linnea's room was at the back of the house, over the kitchen, small and warm, with a slanted ceiling on one side where the roof came down and a window that looked out on the alley and the CR-V and the Fenstermachers' grape arbor. Her nine snow globes stood on the windowsill in their order. Number one this week was a plastic penguin from the zoo in Philadelphia. He set her on the bed, on the quilt his mother had made with the patches of horses and stars, and sat beside her, and wrapped the bag of peas in the pillowcase from her spare pillow so it wouldn't be too cold, and held it out to her.
"Can I put this on? It'll help it not puff up."