Chapter 6 - Dishes and Raised Voices
The placemats were still damp where the glasses had sweated. I stacked Lily's empty spot first, though there wasn't much to stack. Just her fork laid too neatly across nothing, like she'd tried to make it look finished.
Vanessa picked up Mason's plate with both hands. She didn't look at me. The warm bulb over the table buzzed faint in that way it did at night when the house went quiet.
"You don't have to do that," she said.
"I've got it," I said. My voice came out lower than I meant.
We carried them into the kitchen. The tile was cold through my socks. I set the plates by the sink and turned the water on hot, let it run while she scraped. The sound filled the room enough that we didn't have to talk for a minute. I was glad for it. My hand with the ring on it shook a little when I held the edge of the counter, so I put it in the water.
She handed me the clear glass. Mason's fingerprints were all around it. I rinsed it and set it upside down on the towel.
"We can't do this every night," she said, quiet.
I glanced toward the hall. Both bedroom doors were shut. The night-light in the hall threw a thin line under Mason's door.
"What?" I said.
"This." She nodded back toward the dining room, toward the table and the sheer curtains hanging still over the dark windows. "Undoing it in front of them. You give her apple slices after I said no, then what am I?"
I turned the faucet down so I could hear her better. "I wasn't trying to make you something. She hadn't eaten."
Vanessa dried her hands hard on the towel. "She ate at school."
"You said she already ate. She told me she was hungry."
"She's five, Daniel." She caught herself, lowered her voice again. "Five-year-olds say they're hungry when they want attention. She needs to learn she can't just be difficult at the table and get rewarded for it."
The name stopped me more than the words. She almost never used my name like that unless we were into something real.
I put the plate down slowly. Steam rose off it. "Hunger is not discipline," I said. "You don't teach that with an empty plate."
Her mouth tightened. "You think I starved her? I skipped one meal because she threw a fit this afternoon about her snack and then lied to me about it. That's it. You're acting like—"
"I'm acting like her dad," I said. It came out sharper than I wanted. I breathed and backed it down. "I'm not okay with food being the punishment. That's my line."
She stared at me. In the low kitchen light I could see how tired she was, the pulled-back hair gone loose at the sides. For a second she looked less stern and more cornered.
"You set lines now?" she said.
"Yeah," I said. "On this, I do."
We stood there with the sink between us. The dishwasher hummed when I finally opened it and started loading. White plates, one with the chipped edge we always fought about throwing away. Forks. The glass. Ordinary sounds, too loud.
She picked up a placemat and folded it, then unfolded it. "So I’m the bad guy because I want them to listen."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to." She kept her voice even, but her hands weren't. "You knelt there and held her face and looked at me like I did something to her."
I didn't answer right away because Mason's door creaked down the hall. Just a small shift, bedsprings, then quiet again. We both froze and listened. Nothing. I let out a breath.
"We can't fix this tonight," I said.
"Then when?" she said.
"Tomorrow. Without them in the middle."
She nodded once, but not like agreement. More like she needed the conversation to stop. She wiped the counter even though it was already clean, long strokes, then hung the towel crooked.
"I'll sleep—" she started.
I waited.
She didn't finish. She just went to our bedroom and left the door half open, the lamp still on in there. I stayed in the kitchen a minute longer with my hands in the cooling water, listening to the house settle. The refrigerator clicked. Somewhere outside a car passed and was gone.
May you like
I dried the last plate myself and turned off the kitchen light. The dining room sat dark behind me, table cleared, chairs pushed in, curtains pale in the window. It looked normal. It didn't feel normal.
In the bedroom she was already on her side, facing away, phone dark on the nightstand. I lay down on top of the covers for a while, ring cold against my own arm. Neither of us reached across. The talk just hung there, paused, waiting for morning.
