Josie and Grandpa Walt both looked at him. He was looking at the platter. His own big piece was still on his plate, barely touched, with the fallen-out bite next to it, and he was looking at the platter with the face he made when he thought he might be in trouble but was asking anyway, because he was seven and the chicken was there and the world had gone strange and he didn't know what else to do with himself.
"You've got some," Josie said. "Eat what you have."
"It's cold now."
"It's not cold."
"It *feels* cold."
Grandpa Walt reached out and picked up the tongs from the platter. His hand was shaking a little. He chose a drumstick, a small one, crisp, and he held it out over the table, not toward Benji, but toward Josie's plate. He held it there in the air above the cold rice. And then he stopped.
Josie looked at the drumstick. She looked at her plate. Her stomach, which had been a hard knot since the bus, turned over and growled, loud enough that Benji heard and looked at her.
She wanted it. She wanted it so much she felt sick. And she could not take it from that hand. She didn't know why. It wasn't fair, it wasn't anybody's fault, it was chicken; it was just chicken. But if she ate it now, it would be the slap's chicken. It would be chicken that came because somebody got hit. And the whole time she was eating it, her mother would be on the other side of the bathroom door, with her hand on her face.
"I'm not hungry," she said.
Grandpa Walt held the drumstick a moment longer. Then he set it back on the platter, gently, as if it might break, and put the tongs down beside it.
"All right," he said.
"Can I be excused?"
He looked at her. Something moved in his face. Josie thought, later, that maybe that was the question he had asked his whole life at his own table, or had heard asked, and had answered a certain way.
"You don't have to ask me that," he said. "Go on."
She went. But at the doorway she stopped and turned back, because Benji was still sitting there alone with Grandpa at the dim table with the water dripping, and his shoulders were up by his ears.