He walked in the front door and the rug caught it, the way it always did. He went down the hall. He stood in the doorway of the dining room. Somebody — Vanessa, before she left for her cousin's place in Springfield — had cleared the table. The beige placemats were stacked neatly. The china cabinet stood against the wall with its lamp turned off. Everything was clean. Everything was in order.
He could not go in.
He stood in the doorway for five full minutes with his hand on the frame, and he could see it — the small glass plate, the plain roll, his daughter's hand reaching, the slap like a book closing — and he understood that he was never going to make his children eat dinner in this room again. That nobody should have to.
He called a realtor that afternoon.
His sister Renee drove up from Atlanta that weekend with her two teenage boys and a trunk full of moving boxes. Renee was three years younger than Andre and ran the billing department of a dental practice, and she packed a house the way she ran billing: by color-coded labels and no sentiment. But when she got to the china cabinet she slowed down. She wrapped every plate in newspaper. She held the lighthouse plate a long moment.
"Grandma Pearl's," she said.
"I know."
"You want to keep it?"
He thought about it. "Keep it for the kids. Not for the wall. Maybe someday they'll want it."
Renee nodded and wrapped it twice and wrote THEO & LULU — KEEP on the box in black marker.
The apartment he found was on the second floor of a converted brick building on Halsey Street, four minutes from his mother's house and two blocks from Fairmount Elementary, close enough to walk. Two bedrooms — one for him, one for the kids. A kitchen with a window over the sink that looked out on a sycamore tree. No dining room at all. Just a round table by the window, secondhand from a church sale, with four mismatched chairs and a pale wood top that Lulu said looked like the inside of a cookie.
IX
The pediatrician, Dr. Luz Herrera, was small and quick and wore sneakers with her white coat. She weighed Lulu, listened to her heart, looked at her teeth and the insides of her eyelids, and asked her what her favorite food was.
Lulu looked at her father before she answered. Andre nodded.
"Rolls," she said.
"Good choice," Dr. Herrera said, and wrote it down as if it were medical information, which, Andre would come to think, it was.