She begins pulling out half-opened sleeves of Ritz crackers. A Twix. An unopened bag of Fritos. A chocolate chip cookie from school wrapped up in napkins. Three packages of pink-iced animal crackers. Laid out on the bed like that it looks like a lot more than it did when it was shoved in the drawer. I want to throw a blanket over it all.

“I really just want to go to bed.”

“Lou, we need to talk about this.” She stands and walks closer to me.

“Talk about what?” I curl away from her toward the window.

“Honey, why is all this in your room? Are you not getting enough to eat? I don’t want you to feel like you have to hide food.” She kneels in front of me, and I’m staring at the top of her head. “Lou, I will buy you whatever you need.” She starts to put a hand out toward my knee, and I jerk away so hard my leg knocks into the window with a crack. We sit like that for a few minutes. Frozen.

I try to think of a way to explain it, but I can’t. How do you explain to someone who’s never gone without food for more than a couple of hours what it’s like to be hungry for months? To always be looking at the leftovers on strangers’ plates? To feel that gnawing in your belly and then, eventually, not to feel it at all?

“I’ll take the stuff downstairs.”

“No, honey. It’s okay.” She wipes a finger under one eye, and I can’t tell if she’s crying. “Keep it if you want to. I just want to know if you’re okay?”

Am I okay? I don’t know. How can anybody really answer that?

She sits back on her heels now, tucking her robe underneath her.

“You know, your mom and I used to sneak boxes of Ritz crackers back to our room and dip them straight into the peanut butter jar. It drove our mama crazy… all those crumbs.”

“Mom and I do that too. With the peanut butter.”

She smiles and leans her head on the leg of the chair. I look at her hands folded in her lap; the freckles reach all the way down to her fingertips. It reminds me of something.

“Ginger?”

“Hmm?”

“Did we go to a strawberry patch when I was little?”

She lifts her head and looks at me.

“I can’t believe you remember that. You must have been four, maybe five. Yes, we did. Just outside of Lexington. I was finishing up law school at the University of Kentucky, and you and your mom came to visit.”

“I fell in the dirt and you helped me up.”

“Did I?”