She continued to circle the towel around the same dish until the ceramic turned hot. She set it on the dry stack next to the rack.
“Please don’t be ashamed,” Ma said, touching her shoulder. The tenderness made her jump. “But don’t deny it, either.”
Beddy wanted to change the subject, but she couldn’t think of anything. She just kept at the task in front of her, rinse, scrub, rinse, dry, and hoped Ma would change it for her.
“I’m going to give you till the end of this chore to tell me the truth.”
The truth was Void ate it, and so much of it, but she couldn’t say that, because Ma never wanted to hear about what she called “the unreal.”
Her dish pile was down to three, and she scrubbed and rinsed as slowly as she could.
“I’m being tough on you because I don’t want what happened to Aunt Simone, happen to you. Doctor said it’s in our genes.”
Jeans?
Somehow, the forks Void ate after finishing his meals would find their way into Beddy’s jeans and be mangled in the wash. Ma had confronted her in the laundry room once, holding up a crop of them accusingly to her face. “Look at these,” she’d said. Showed her the bent tines. “They’re all askew.” At the time, this reminded Beddy of the riddle about the door. When is a fork not a fork?
She reached for the last plate in the sink.
“It was me,” she said.