The nightlight hummed. Outside, a car went by and its headlights swept slow across the ceiling and over the moon and away.
"Go to sleep, Benji."
"I'm *asking*."
"I know you're asking." She swallowed. "Yes."
He seemed satisfied by that. Or he was too tired to push. He turned on his side toward the wall and in a few minutes his breathing got slow and heavy, and his foot found her shin under the covers and kicked it, once, and stayed there.
She didn't sleep for a long time. She lay and listened to the house. The water ran in the kitchen and stopped. The radio clicked off. The screen door to the porch opened with its long creak and slapped shut. Then nothing for a long time. Then, very late, the bathroom door opened, and footsteps came down the hall, slow, and stopped outside their door.
Josie closed her eyes and made her breathing go slow like Benji's.
The door opened a few inches. A stripe of hall light fell across the carpet between the beds, across the empty one and up onto the comforter. Josie could feel it on her face through her eyelids. She kept her eyes closed. She could hear her mother breathing in the doorway.
Her mother stood there a long time. Long enough that Josie almost opened her eyes. Long enough that she almost said *Mama*. She didn't know what she would say after it. She didn't say it.
Then the stripe of light narrowed, and went out, and the door clicked, and the footsteps went back up the hall to her mother's room, and that door closed too.
Josie opened her eyes in the dark and looked at the moon on the ceiling until it blurred.
***
Theresa was in the kitchen before the light.
She hadn't slept, or had slept in pieces, and at five she gave up and came out in her robe and turned on the small light over the stove. The kitchen smelled faintly of cold oil. Everything had been washed and put away, the counter wiped, the tongs back in the drawer. She knew her father had done it. Nobody else in the house dried the tongs.
Then she saw the plate.