The Trade

Paulette had the wooden spoon halfway to Nell's arm before I got my body between them.

"Move, Silas." Her voice was flat, the voice she used when she'd already decided something and didn't feel like repeating herself.

"She didn't mean to spill it," I said. "She's five. I'll clean it up."

"That's not what I asked."

Behind me I could feel Nell shaking, both fists twisted into the back of my shirt, and I did the thing I'd gotten good at doing over the two years I'd lived in this house: I turned my body just enough that when the spoon came down, it caught my shoulder instead of her arm.

It hurt less than people would think. Not because it didn't hurt — it did, a sharp white line of it that stayed for an hour — but because I'd built a kind of math in my head a long time ago. A spoon on my shoulder was a fair trade for a spoon on a five-year-old's arm. It always would be.

"You're getting too old to keep doing this," Paulette said, setting the spoon back on the counter like she'd just finished a normal chore. "One of these days I won't feel like aiming around you."

She said it almost gently, which was somehow worse than if she'd yelled it.

Nell's grip on my shirt didn't loosen until Paulette's footsteps faded down the hall. Then she peered around my side at the spilled juice still spreading across the linoleum, and whispered, "Am I in trouble?"

"No," I told her, already reaching for a towel. "You're not in trouble. You're never in trouble. That's just how this house works."