Her mother didn't look.
Through the doorway, past the end of the counter, the refrigerator stood humming in its corner. It was covered in magnets. There were magnets from the pizza place and the dentist where her mother worked and the insurance agent, magnets shaped like a strawberry, like a lighthouse, like Ohio. There was a magnet with Benji's kindergarten photo inside a plastic frame, Benji with one front tooth missing, grinning like he'd gotten away with something. There was a drawing of a dinosaur by Benji, and a drawing of a house by Benji, and a construction paper turkey from last November by Benji with his handprint for the feathers. There was the calendar from the bank, turned to October, a picture of a covered bridge, with the boxes filled in with her mother's square handwriting. *Benji dentist 4:15. Dad PT. Benji soccer. Dad PT. Pay gas.*
Josie had looked at that refrigerator a thousand times. She knew where everything was on it. She knew there was a space, just above the handle and to the left of the calendar, where nothing was, where a paper could go.
Grandpa Walt came in from the porch at six exactly. He used the cane in the house now only when he was tired, and tonight he was tired; she could hear it tapping before she saw him. He was wearing his brown cardigan over a collared shirt, buttoned wrong by one button so that one side hung lower.
"Smells like the county fair," he said.
"Sit down, Dad," her mother said. "It's ready."
He lowered himself into his chair at the head of the table, one hand on the table edge, one on the cane, and Josie saw his mouth tighten and then go flat. He hung the cane on the back of the chair. He looked at the table she had set.
"Who folded these?" he said, picking up his napkin.
"Me," said Josie.
"Triangles," he said. "Your grandmother did triangles."
That was all. He shook it out and put it in his lap. But Josie felt the stone in her pocket get warmer.
***
Her mother brought the chicken to the table on the big white platter and set it in the middle, so that it sat there between the four of them like something in a painting, piled high and steaming, the light from the fixture overhead catching the crust. The fixture had three bulbs and one had burned out in September, so the light was uneven, warm in the middle of the table and dim at the edges, and the corners of the room were brown with shadow. Her mother never turned on the overhead in the kitchen during dinner. She said it made the house feel like a hospital.
Then her mother brought the rice. A bowl of white rice, plain, with the steam coming off it.
She went around the table. She spooned rice onto Grandpa Walt's plate, and onto Benji's, and onto her own. Then she came to Josie's and spooned the rice onto it, two big spoonfuls, and smoothed it flat with the back of the spoon, the way you would smooth sand.