"Where are you going?" Vanessa said. "Andre. Where are you going?"
He did not look back.
"Come on, kids."
The door caught on the rug. He pulled it the rest of the way open, and the cold October air came in, and then the door shut behind them. The deadbolt did not turn, because there was nobody on the other side to turn it.
II
Vanessa stood in the hall until she heard the truck start.
It was a loud truck, a white F-150 with the TruClean decal on both doors, and it coughed twice before it caught. She heard it back out of the driveway. She heard it pause at the end of the street, the way Andre always paused even when nothing was coming, and then she heard it go.
She went back into the dining room because she did not know where else to go.
Her plate was where she had left it. The steak had begun to set at the edges, a skin of fat going pale on the china. The broccoli had stopped steaming. Her knife lay across the rim at a precise angle, the way her mother had taught her — knife at ten o'clock, fork at four, and a lady never lets her silverware touch the table.
She sat down. She did not decide to; her knees simply stopped holding her.
The roll was still on its glass plate. Nobody had touched it. It sat there ordinary under the lamp, and she stared at it with her mouth open, and she could not seem to close it.
That's not what happened, she thought again, and the words sounded strange inside her own head, like a song played at the wrong speed.
Because what had happened? A child had reached for food after being told no. A child had been corrected. That was what mothers did. That was what her own mother had done every night of her life, at a table in a duplex in Gary, Indiana, with a padlock on the pantry door and the key on a shoelace around her neck. You eat what you're given when you're given it. You don't eat because you want to. Wanting is how a girl ends up fat and foolish and left. Vanessa had been a thin, quiet, well-behaved child, and her mother's church friends used to say, Loretta, how do you get that girl so good? and her mother would say, Structure.
Structure. That was all she had been trying to give them. Two children running wild since their mother died, eating cereal for supper, falling asleep in front of the television, a father who loved them so much he could not say no to anything. She had walked into this house a year ago and seen it all, and she had thought: I can fix this. I can be the one who fixes this.
She looked at the empty chair where Lulu had knelt. There was a damp, darker spot on the beige placemat where the tears had landed.
She thought of Theo's face. She won't let her eat. He had said it so plainly, as if he had practiced.