Lulu ate with her face close to the plate and her left arm curled around it. Gloria saw that. Andre saw his mother see it. Her mouth went thin, and she said nothing, and she brought more eggs.
Theo ate slowly, watching his sister.
When the plates were clean Gloria ran a bath, and Lulu went down the hall holding her grandmother's hand. Andre cleared the table because he had to do something with his body. On Lulu's chair, where she had been sitting, there was nothing. But when he picked up the jacket she had left over the back of it — her purple puffy coat — something heavy shifted in the pocket.
He reached in. Half a piece of toast, folded in a napkin. And under it, flattened and stale, a dinner roll in a sandwich bag, and two peanut butter crackers, and a fruit snack with a cartoon on the wrapper from some birthday party he did not remember her going to.
He stood in his mother's kitchen holding his daughter's emergency supply, and he heard Theo come up behind him.
"She keeps it for later," Theo said quietly. "In case."
Andre did not turn around. He was afraid of what his face was doing.
"In case what, son?"
Theo was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Dad, I have to show you something."
IV
It was a black-and-white composition notebook, the marbled kind that came three for five dollars in August. Theo kept it in the zippered pocket at the back of his backpack, behind his reading folder, where Vanessa never looked because she did not like touching the backpacks; she said they were filthy. On the front cover, in careful pencil, he had written MATH JOURNAL — THEO L. — GR. 3.
"So nobody would read it," he said.
They sat on the couch in the den, under the framed photograph of Andre's father in his Navy dress whites. The television was off. From the bathroom down the hall came splashing and his mother's voice singing something about a little boat.
Andre opened the cover.
The first pages really were math — times tables, a worksheet about rounding with a sticker of a smiling star. Then, on a page in the middle, the handwriting changed. It got smaller. Neater. Like a boy trying hard to write like a grown-up.
FEB 3. Dad nite shift. L no dinner bc she did not finish lunch. I gave her my granola bar in our room.