Benji's plate: the big breast with three bites gone, the bitten piece that had fallen out of his mouth when he started to cry. Theresa's plate: rice, a breast untouched, the fork lying across it where she'd put it down when he said *say that again*. His own: the thigh, one bite.
Josie's plate he carried last. The rice had gone cold and stiff, a skin across the top of it, the marks of the back of the spoon still in it where Theresa had smoothed it down. He stood over the trash can with the plate in his hand and could not tip it in.
He set it on the counter instead.
The platter he wrapped in foil, the whole pile of chicken, most of it untouched, gleaming under the stove light. He found a place for it in the refrigerator between the milk and a jar of pickles. When he closed the door the magnets rattled. The kindergarten photo of the boy. The turkey with the handprint feathers. The lighthouse, the strawberry, Ohio. He stood looking at the door of that refrigerator for a long time, at all the bright things fixed to it, and at the space just above the handle where nothing was.
He thought about the hot dog on Michael's plate. He had not thought about it in thirty years and now he could not see anything else.
He had been forty years old that spring. Ruth in the bedroom with the door shut, not eating, not talking, looking at the wall. The plant on short shifts. The roof leaking over the back porch. He had come home every night to a house that felt like a held breath, and the only thing in it that moved was the boy, dancing on the rug in his underpants, laughing at nothing. And the girl. The girl was always watching him. Sitting at the table with her shoulders up, her gray eyes on him, Ruth's tray balanced on her knees, judging him. That was what he had told himself it was. Judging. That she looked at him like she knew he was failing. And maybe she did know. She was nine; she knew everything.
*Meat's for the ones who bring some joy into this house.*
He had thought it was a joke. Half a joke. He had wanted the boy to laugh again, and the boy did laugh, and the girl said *that's not fair*, in that flat clear voice, exactly right, and his hand had gone out before he knew it.
He had gone to the garage afterward and sat on an overturned bucket in the dark and told himself he would never do it again. He told himself that the next two times, also. Then Ruth got up, and the spring came, and things went back to something like ordinary, and he had folded those weeks away somewhere so small and so far down that he honestly believed, most days, that they had happened to some other man. He had been a good enough father after that. He had walked her down the aisle to that Reyes boy, whom he never liked, and he had been right not to.
He had not known she remembered. That was a lie. He had known. He had known every Christmas when she sat at his table with her shoulders up near her ears.
And tonight, with the chicken in front of him, he had heard his own voice come out of his daughter's mouth, the same words, the same little lift on *joy*, aimed at a girl in a yellow sweater with her head bowed over a plate of nothing. And something in him had come up out of the floor. Not righteousness. He wanted to believe it was righteousness; it would be easier. It was something older and uglier than that. It was shame, and shame had always had only one thing to do with its hands.
*Say that again.*
He had wanted her to say it so he could be sure. And when she wouldn't, when she closed her eyes and said *Dad, please, not in front of*, he had seen the nine-year-old in her face, the one waiting for it, and he had done it anyway. To that face. In front of her children. In front of the girl he was supposed to be standing up for, who had come out of her chair crying *don't* at him as if he were the one at that table who needed stopping.
He was. She had seen it before he had.
Walter ran the water hot in the sink and washed the glasses. He washed the forks. He washed the tongs and dried them and put them in the drawer. He washed his own hands twice, scrubbing between the fingers, and then stood with them dripping over the sink and looked at them under the stove light. Spotted. Swollen at the knuckles. The hands of an old man who could no longer get up from a chair without thinking about it first.