Josie didn't answer. Over the top of Benji's head she looked at Grandpa Walt. He was looking at the two of them, and his face was a face she had never seen on him or on anyone. His mustache moved as if he were going to say something, and then didn't. The skin under his eyes looked thin and wet. He looked, she thought, old. Not old like he always looked, gray and slow and creaking when he sat down. Old like something that had been left out in the weather.
"Is Grandpa going to hit me?" Benji said.
"No," Josie said, too fast, and then she looked at Grandpa again, and she realized she didn't know, and she hated that she didn't know, and she held Benji tighter.
Grandpa Walt heard it. She saw him hear it. He closed his eyes for a second, the way her mother had closed hers.
"No," he said. His voice was rough. "No, son. Nobody's going to hit you."
Benji pressed his face harder into Josie's sweater and did not look at him.
Grandpa Walt lowered himself back into his chair at the head of the table. He did it badly, without the cane, and Josie saw the pain go across his face and then go away. He sat there with his hands flat on either side of his plate. On the plate was the thigh with one bite out of it, and the rice, and a little smear of grease. He looked at the plate for a long time.
Then he looked at Josie's plate across the table, where her chair was pushed back and empty. The rice sat there, white and flattened, a little skin forming on top of it now that it had cooled.
"How long," he said.
Josie didn't understand. "What?"
"How long has she been doing that."
Josie stood with her arms around her brother and didn't answer. She didn't know how to answer. *Doing that* wasn't one thing; it was a hundred small things, and some of them she might have imagined, and most of them she had never told anyone, not even herself in words. If she said *always*, it wasn't true. If she said *sometimes*, it made it sound like nothing. And if she said anything at all, she would be telling on her mother, to the man who had just hit her mother across the face, and her mother was in the bathroom with the door locked.
"I don't know," she said.
He nodded slowly, like that was an answer. Maybe it was.
"Where is it," he said. "The honor roll."