*Meat's for the ones who bring some joy into this house,* her father had said, putting the hot dog on Michael's plate. Not cruelly, she thought now. Or not only cruelly. Tiredly. Like a man who had nothing left and was trying to find something to reward. Like a man who wanted to be laughed at so badly that he would pay for it with the only currency he had.
She had said, *That's not fair.*
And he had slapped her. Not hard, not as hard as tonight. Hard enough. Across the same cheek. And then he had looked at his hand, the way he had looked at it tonight, and gotten up from the table and gone out to the garage and not come back in until she was in bed.
It only happened a few more times. She could count them, if she wanted to; she had never wanted to. It stopped when her mother got out of bed. It stopped when Theresa learned to make him laugh, or learned at least to be quiet in a way that looked like it might be about to turn into laughing. It stopped, and they never talked about it, and she grew up and went to college and married Danny and had Josie and buried her mother and her father stood at the back of the funeral home in his good suit and did not cry, and they never talked about it, and then he broke his hip in May and there was nowhere else for him to go.
She had not thought about the beans in years.
She had not thought about them tonight, standing over Benji's plate. Not consciously. That was what made her want to tear the skin off her own face. She had said it in her father's words, in his rhythm, with his exact little lift on the word *joy*, and she had not even known she was quoting.
And he had known. He had heard it from the head of the table and known it instantly, the way you know your own handwriting on an envelope you don't remember mailing.
*Say that again.*
He had wanted to hear himself. That was what she understood, sitting in the bathroom. He wasn't asking her to repeat it. He was asking her whether it was really him.
Theresa took the washcloth from her face and folded it in half and laid it over the edge of the sink. Her cheek throbbed. In the mirror the red had settled into a shape, darker in the middle, the shape of four fingers if you looked for them.
Down the hall, through the door, she could hear the children's voices. Josie's low and steady. Benji's higher, asking something. Then quiet.
She did not go to them. She sat back down on the toilet lid with her hands between her knees and listened to the house.
***
Walter Haddon cleared the table.
He did it because he did not know what else to do, and because Ruth used to say that when the world went wrong you could at least wash a dish. His hip ground every time he stood. He did it anyway. He carried the plates one at a time, because two at a time he couldn't manage with the cane, and he scraped them over the trash can under the sink.