"Benji. Come on."
He scrambled down off his chair so fast he nearly fell, and ran to her, and took her hand, and they went down the hall together, past the bathroom door with the light showing underneath it, past it without stopping, to the room at the end where the two of them slept in two beds with a strip of carpet between.
Behind them, in the dining room, Grandpa Walt sat alone at the head of the table with the honor roll beside his plate, and did not move for a long time.
***
In the bathroom, Theresa Reyes sat on the closed lid of the toilet with a washcloth pressed to her face and did not cry.
She had run the cold tap until the water was as cold as it would go, and soaked the cloth and wrung it, and now she held it against her cheek and felt the heat of her skin come through it. Her ear was ringing, a high faint note, like a glass someone had run a wet finger around. She could feel the shape of his hand. Four fingers and the heel. It had been a long time since she had felt that shape, and her body remembered it before her mind did, the way your feet remember a step in the dark.
She was forty-one years old. She had signed papers at a lawyer's office. She had sold her mother's house. And her father had hit her at the dinner table, and she was sitting in the bathroom with the door locked, and none of it, not one year of it, had made any difference.
That was the first thing she thought. The second thing, which came slower and worse, was the sound Josie had made.
*No.* High and broken. *No, don't, Grandpa, don't.*
Her daughter had gotten out of her chair and put herself between them. Theresa had seen it out of the edge of her eye, even with her head turned, even with the ringing. A girl in a yellow sweater with her arms held out. Theresa had looked at the wall because she could not look at that.
She took the washcloth away from her face and looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. The left side of her face was red from the cheekbone to the jaw, darkening at the center. Her eyes were dry. They looked like her father's eyes. Everyone always said that, when she was a girl: *you've got your daddy's eyes*. Gray-blue and set deep, so that she always looked a little tired even when she wasn't.
Josie didn't have them. Josie had brown eyes, wide and dark and wet at the edges, like her father's. Josie had her father's hair, those black curls that wouldn't lie flat no matter what you did with them. Josie had his way of looking down when she was hurt, chin tucked, so you could see the part in her hair. Josie had his way of standing in a doorway and waiting to be asked in.
Theresa put the washcloth back on her face.
***
She had been pregnant with Josie the spring her mother got sick.