I
The roll sat on a small clear glass plate in the middle of the table, plain and pale and a little shiny on top, the kind that came twelve to a bag from the Kroger on Delancey Street. Lulu had been looking at it for a long time.
She was five and a half, and she had learned that looking was allowed. Looking did not make noise. Looking did not touch anything. She knelt on the dining chair so she could see over the edge of the dark wooden table, elbows tucked in close the way she had been taught, the bright pink hair ties at the ends of her twists like little pieces of candy. Her daddy had done those twists on Sunday night while she sat between his knees watching cartoons. When he finished he had said, There, now you look like a whole bouquet, and she had laughed so hard she got the hiccups.
That was Sunday. This was Thursday. Daddy had worked Monday night and Tuesday night, and then the storm crew had sent him up to Dayton for two days, so he had not been home since — she counted on her fingers under the table — since a long time.
The dining room was dim. Vanessa liked it dim at dinner; she said overhead lights were for offices. One lamp glowed on top of the china cabinet, and the decorative plates behind its glass doors caught the light: blue birds, a gold rim, a white plate with a blue lighthouse that had belonged to Daddy's grandmother. The walls were the color of milky tea. The placemat in front of Lulu was beige and bumpy, woven like a basket, and she had been running her fingertip along its rows to keep her hands busy.
Across the table, Vanessa ate.
She ate neatly, the way she did everything. She cut her meat into squares and set her knife down between bites. There was a steak on her plate, a thick brown patty of it, and a heap of potatoes cubed small and shining yellow with butter, and broccoli, bright green, the little trees standing up. The smell filled the room, pepper and onion and the warm brown smell of meat, and Lulu's stomach made a sound so loud she pressed both hands over it.
Vanessa looked up.
She wore her black hair pulled back so tight it seemed to lift her eyebrows. She had on a dark maroon turtleneck, the soft kind, and small gold earrings. She was pretty. Lulu had thought so the very first time, at the pancake place, when Daddy said, This is my friend Vanessa, and Vanessa had bent down and said, I love your shoes.
That was a long time ago too.
"You had your chance at lunch," Vanessa said.
Lulu did not say that lunch had been a cheese stick and four crackers, and that she had given two of the crackers to Marisol, who forgot hers. She did not say that she had not had breakfast, because she had spilled the milk, and Vanessa said spillers don't get seconds, and there had not been any firsts left. She did not say anything, because saying things was a kind of noise.
But the roll was right there. It was closer to her than to anybody. Theo's chair was empty — Theo had been sent upstairs for talking back, which meant he had said, She didn't do anything — and the roll was so close, and so plain, and nobody was eating it, and her hand went out before her brain could tell it not to.
Her fingers touched the edge of the glass plate.
Vanessa's hand came down on the back of hers, quick and flat. The sound was small and sharp, like a book closing.