Her mother came around with the pan. She put two eggs on Josie's plate, scrambled, yellow. Then toast, two pieces, buttered. Then she went to the refrigerator and got the foil-wrapped platter and peeled it back, and the cold chicken was there, all of it, crisp and dark, and she took the drumstick from the top, the small one, the one Grandpa had held over Josie's plate last night and put back, and she put it on Josie's plate beside the eggs.
Then she went to Benji's place and put two eggs, and two pieces of toast, and a drumstick. Then her own. Then the fourth plate, at the head of the table, which nobody was sitting at. Two eggs. Two toast. A drumstick. The same. Every plate the same.
She did not say anything about it. She did not say *chicken is for* anything. She put the pan back on the stove.
Josie looked at her plate.
Her stomach was so empty it hurt. She picked up the fork. She ate a bite of egg. Then another. Then she picked up the drumstick in her fingers, cold from the refrigerator, and bit into it, and the crust was still a little crisp, and it was the buttermilk and the pepper and the red thing she didn't know the name of, and it was the best thing she had ever eaten, and she hated that it was, and she ate it anyway, the whole thing, down to the bone, with her head down so that nobody could see her face.
Nobody said anything while she ate. Her mother stood at the counter. Grandpa sat on his stool. The clock over the stove ticked.
When she looked up, her mother was at the refrigerator.
She had the certificate in her hand. She was holding it against the door, in the space above the handle, to the left of the calendar, and with her other hand she was moving magnets. She took the strawberry and put it back. She took the lighthouse and put it back. Then she found the black square one from the insurance agent, the plain one, and pressed it down over the top edge of the paper.
It was a little crooked. Her mother didn't fix it.
She stood there with her hand flat on the paper for a second, her back to the room. Josie could see her shoulders. They were up near her ears. Then her mother let go, and went back to the stove, and turned off the burner that was already off.
"Benji's going to want toast," her mother said, to nobody.
Josie looked at the refrigerator. At the dinosaur and the house and the handprint turkey and the kindergarten picture of Benji with the tooth missing. At the calendar with the covered bridge. *Benji dentist 4:15. Dad PT.* And there among them, held by the black square, a little crooked: HONOR ROLL. JOSEPHINE A. REYES.
She didn't say anything. She didn't know what you were supposed to say. She looked down at her plate, at the clean drumstick bone and the toast crusts, and she picked up the second piece of toast and ate that too.
Down the hall Benji was calling for her. In the kitchen her grandfather set down his cup, very quietly, so that it hardly made a sound at all. Her mother's face, when she turned to the window, was still purple along the bone, and would be tomorrow, and the day after that.
Josie finished her eggs. Then she got up and went to get her brother.