Afterward, in the hall, the doctor explained it to him plainly. Lulu was underweight, but not in danger; her bloodwork would tell them more. The hard part would not be the weight. The weight would come back. The hard part would be what she had learned.
"Kids who've had food used as control," Dr. Herrera said, "learn that food can disappear. So they hoard. They eat fast. They eat past full, because their body doesn't trust there'll be a next time. You can't argue them out of it. You can only prove it wrong, over and over, for a long time. Regular meals. Regular snacks, same times every day, so she can predict them. And don't take away what she hides. I know it'll get gross. Let her keep it. Swap the stale for fresh, quietly. The message is: there's always more, and nobody is going to take it."
That night Andre went to the Kroger on Delancey and bought two bags of dinner rolls, the plain kind, twelve to a bag. At the apartment he took a wicker basket Renee had left behind and lined it with a dish towel and filled it, and he set it on the kitchen counter at exactly Lulu's height, right by the refrigerator, where she could reach it without a stool.
He crouched next to her. "This basket is yours. Anytime you want one, you take one. Morning, night, middle of the night. You don't have to ask me."
She looked at the basket. She looked at him. "What if I take two?"
"Then you take two."
"What if I take them all?"
"Then I go buy more."
She did not believe him. He could see it. She nodded the way she nodded at grown-ups who said things that weren't true.
At two in the morning he woke to a small sound in the kitchen. He did not get up. He lay in the dark and listened: the soft rustle of plastic, the tiny creak of the floor by the refrigerator, bare feet padding back down the hall. In the morning, three rolls were gone. That night he found them under her pillow, wrapped in a pair of her socks.
He left them there. He put three fresh ones in the basket.
It went on like that for weeks. Rolls under the pillow, in her coat pockets, inside the toy kitchen Renee's boys had carried up the stairs. Once, tucked into the toe of her rain boot. Andre swapped them for fresh ones when they got hard, and said nothing, and kept the basket full. Every day after school she checked it. She did not take anything; she just stood on tiptoe and looked, the way you check that the stove is off.
The family therapist the county assigned was a soft-voiced woman named Dr. Lorraine Fitch who worked out of a converted Victorian house full of sand trays and dollhouses. In the third session Lulu built a kitchen out of blocks and put a tiny plastic lady in it, and then took the lady out and set her on the windowsill, facing away.
"Where's she going?" Dr. Fitch asked.
"Time-out," Lulu said. "A long one."
"How does that feel?"