It sat on the counter by the sink where he had left it. One of her mother's white plates with the thin blue line. Josie's rice on it, a hard pale mound now, dry at the edges, still holding the marks of the spoon. And beside it, face up, flattened, the certificate. HONOR ROLL. FIRST QUARTER. JOSEPHINE A. REYES.
Theresa stood and looked at the two of them side by side for a long time.
She thought she might cry then, and she didn't. She picked up the certificate and read it. Mrs. Albright's purple signature. The fake gold seal. The A in the middle. She had chosen that name, Ann, after her mother's middle name, lying in the hospital bed with her mother's six minutes still warm on the blanket. She had forgotten she'd done that.
She did not hang it up. Not yet. She put it back down beside the plate, carefully, and scraped the rice into the trash and ran the plate under the hot tap and stood there with her hands in the water until they hurt.
The screen door creaked. Her father came in from the porch.
He had been out there all night, or most of it. She could tell by the way he moved, stiff, the cardigan buttoned wrong and the gray bristle on his jaw. He stopped just inside the door when he saw her. He looked at her face. She watched him find the mark, which had gone from red to a dull plum overnight along the bone, and she watched him make himself keep looking at it.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
"There's coffee," she said finally, though there wasn't. She went to make it.
He lowered himself into a kitchen chair, not the one at the head of the dining table, but the cheap stool by the counter where Benji did his coloring. He hung his cane on the edge of the counter. She measured coffee into the filter with her back to him. Her hands were steady. She was surprised by that.
"I'll call Michael today," he said behind her. "He's got that room in Tucson. Or there's the place on Fairview. They take people with hips."
"Not today."
"Tess."
"Not today, Dad." She turned on the machine. It began to tick and hiss. "I'm not making that decision at five in the morning with my face like this. And neither are you."
He was quiet. The machine dripped.
"I shouldn't have done it," he said.