It takes eight strategically placed pins to make it look like I do not have bangs. The disguise requires twenty-six minutes to perfect, and I skulk into the Junk Yard on Monday breathing a sigh of relief that you can’t tell I’ve butchered my hair.
Brandy notices immediately. “You gave yourself bangs.”
“Things going that bad at home, huh?” Zach adds.
“I used to have bangs.” I touch my forehead self-consciously. My forehead is the first thing I criticize when I look in the mirror. Is it normal-sized? Oilier than most? Foreheads are all I see now. Over the weekend I’ve come across nothing but pictures of beautiful women online and none of them have bangs. I only see pictures of beautiful women with bangs when I do not have bangs.
I Googled how to grow them out faster and ordered an emergency shipment of Mane ’n Tail shampoo and conditioner. I’m taking prenatal vitamins because a forum recommended it for rapid hair growth.
“I like my bangs,” I announce. “This is the new me.”
“Look out, world,” says Brandy, my co-pilot on this adventure into delusion.
Melissa looks at me and bites her lip to suppress a smile. Zach nudges her shoulder and they share twin snickers. For the thousandth time, I wish that Melissa and I were still friends. I love working here, but I loved it even better before introducing Melissa to the man who broke her heart.
She’ll never stop punishing me for it.
In spite of her, I still feel lucky that I landed this job. I’d plastered the county with applications but didn’t hear back from anyone except for Mr.
and Mrs. Howard. Nicholas kept saying I didn’t need to work, but after being laid off from my old job at the hardware store (which closed down), I got bored piddling around the house all day and needed purpose. A conduit through which I could channel all my free-floating energy before it started shooting randomly off the walls and ricocheted back to blast me.
Mr. and Mrs. Howard were both here for my first day, to oversee my training. It led me to believe they’d be here every day, and when they barely ever showed up again it left me confused as to who I was supposed to be reporting to. So I asked Zach, who seemed friendly, and he had me convinced he was my boss for three months straight. That asshole had me scrubbing toilets for his own sordid entertainment.
Without the owners here to keep us in line, the atmosphere is lax and easygoing. Even though Melissa can be frosty sometimes, our odd group has fun together, goofing off and doing nothing. And I mean nothing, because business is flatlining. Whenever a customer comes in, we end up eagle-eyeing them so intensely that they get weirded out and leave. One week, we were freakishly busy and high-fived each other when the shift ended with a fat cash register, thinking the ship was getting turned around.
But nope, everywhere I look there are icebergs. There are holes in the ship.
We’re sinking.
I know the Howards can’t hold out much longer. They’re going to put themselves in debt just to make sure the five of us get a paycheck. We all feel bad about it, but we also want to keep our jobs for as long as possible, so none of us are willing to quit even if it means extending life expectancy for four other jobs. It’s been brought up a few times, usually by Brandy, and we all fidget and avoid eye contact.
Today, it’s me, Zach, Melissa, and Brandy on the schedule. Leon works by himself tomorrow, since he’s the only one who prefers working alone.
He isn’t much of a talker, and embarrasses easily. I think maybe we overwhelm him, horsing around with taxidermied roadkill and quizzing each other to find out Which Sexual Position Are You on BuzzFeed.
About thirty minutes after I walk in, I’m proving my value to this company by fashioning paper clip necklaces for everyone (I make a lot of jewelry out of odds and ends here to pass the time) and listening to Melissa and Brandy negotiate the music schedule. Brandy usually chooses the music on Mondays, but Melissa’s not going to be here for her turn on Friday so she’s trying to get Brandy to switch. To her credit, Brandy isn’t budging. I like to think I’ve been just the right kind of bad influence on her.
The bell to the front door dings and we all orbit to gape at whoever’s come in. It’s an eccentric billionaire who’s going to save us. He’ll buy out everything on our shelves and demand that the Howards replenish them.
He’ll pay us double what we’re asking.
Actually, it’s a gangly, pimpled boy no older than twenty, and he’s pushing a cart of flowers. There are at least ten bouquets in plain glass vases, filmy red cling wrap protecting them from the rain.
“Naomi Westfield?” he asks, consulting a clipboard.
Brandy picks up my hand and holds it aloft. I can’t speak. I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and don’t know why.
“These are for you.”
When I don’t move, he hesitates fractionally and then starts depositing bouquets on the counter. Melissa’s face disappears behind a forest of green plumage and white petals.
The deliveryman leaves and still none of us have moved. I spot a white card sticking out and examine it. It’s supposed to contain a message like I LOVE YOU or SORRY I’M SO AWFUL AND WRONG.
It’s blank. But I know who these are from, and I’ve gotten his message, all right. He might as well have put it on a neon sign. HERE ARE THE
FUCKING FLOWERS YOU NEEDED SO MUCH. ENJOY.
“What’s the occasion?” Zach asks.
My mouth is dry. “Just because.”
“This is … ah.” Melissa grasps for words.
“Excessive,” finishes Zach. “For a ‘just because.’”
“How lovely! What kind are they?” Brandy asks me this like they must be my favorite. I don’t have a favorite type of flower. I definitely have a least favorite, though.
“No idea.”
We safari through our new botanical garden, but there isn’t any information attached. Not even one of those little tabs they stick into the potting soil that tells you how frequently you’re supposed to water it.
“Looks kind of like oleander,” says Melissa warily.
Zach cocks his head. “Isn’t oleander poisonous?”
Suddenly the flowers make sense. It’s an assassination attempt. We all whip out our phones and start looking up pictures of oleander, and it’s true, I can see a resemblance. Five white petals, slightly pinwheeled, in clusters of greenery.
“Why would a flower shop sell poisonous plants?” I ask. “Is that legal?”
Melissa points out that we don’t know for sure these even came from a regulated flower shop. None of us can remember if the delivery boy was wearing a particular kind of uniform. He could’ve been anyone. Maybe Nicholas hired him off Craigslist. WANTED: MURDER ACCOMPLICE.
We give our fingers a workout with frantic Googling. My ominous delivery sure does look like oleander to me, but it also looks like a million other types of flowers. They all look the same. We discover it would be really easy to kill someone with this kind of plant, and according to IMDb that very plot happened in a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer. Michelle’s character used them to kill her lover, a man named Barry. I’m being Barry’d.
Oh god. I hear the pun and nearly faint.
“According to the language of flowers,” Melissa says, “presenting someone with oleander is a way of telling them to watch out. Like, in a threatening way.”
“‘Watch out’ like we’re gonna die, watch out?” My voice is exceptionally high.
“I’m freaking out,” Brandy cries, wringing her hands. “I’m freaking OUT, you guys. Are we sure it’s from Nicholas? I mean, he seems …” She cuts me a sheepish look. “I’m sure he’s nice.”
“Of course it’s from Nicholas,” Zach bites, “and no, he’s not nice.
Dentists are monsters. He’s probably still pissed that I won every round of Clue. When you’re a monster, it takes nothing at all to trigger your dark side.”
“You yelling at him in the dentist’s office that one time could’ve been a trigger,” says Melissa, who needs no convincing. “That’s why you’re on his list.”
“And you’re his friend’s ex. You know how people are about their friends’ exes.” He points at me. “You’re a loose end. Maybe he’s cheating.”
“What about me?” Brandy asks.
“He’s got an insatiable taste for murder by now. You’re collateral damage.”
Brandy looks a bit disappointed that her demise isn’t more personal.
I should be alarmed that we’ve devolved into Nicholas is a cold-blooded killer this rapidly, but weird, melodramatic afternoons are our normal. When you never get any customers, boredom creeps in and conspiracy theories sprout out of any tiny event, which we pass around until mass hysteria takes over. Zach is always the instigator, and he always turns out to be wrong, but the hysteria still catches on every time. When he waves his hands to gesticulate, all wide-eyed and passionate, he can make any bonkers theory sound plausible.
“The oleander,” I whisper. “In the Junk Yard. By Dr. Rose. That’s what this is! It’s some kind of calling card, like all the big-league serial killers use. He’s the Clue Killer.” I inspect the blank message card again. No florist logo. It might as well bear Professor Plum’s demented smile.
“He wants to kill us all because he lost Clue?” Brandy says doubtfully.
“This can’t be right.”
We dive back into our research.
A different website proclaims that oleander means enjoy what’s in front of you and leave the past in the past, which is a nicer alternative to watch out, but then Zach finds a site that looks pretty legit. It informs us that oleander is universally interpreted as caution in the flower language world. I hear the slow, somber bells of my funeral toll and hope someone competent does my makeup if it’s going to be open casket. It occurs to me that I’m a little bit morbid.
“Can you die just from being exposed to it through the air?” I ask. “Do you have to touch it or is standing too close enough?”
Zach, hunched over his phone, mutters, “Yahoo Answers is a cesspit.”
“Was the delivery guy wearing gloves?” Melissa asks. None of us can remember. At this point I don’t remember a single detail about the deliveryman. Maybe it was a woman. A figment of my imagination. I’m hallucinating in the ER.
“Your fiancé might be a maniac,” Brandy tells me. “Come home with me. Wait. I’ve got a date tonight.” She pauses. “You could stay at my sister’s place! She does have five cats, though, so you might sneeze a lot.”
It’s a sweet offer, but there’s no way I’m sleeping with cats. Their hair gets stuck to everything and I’ll get perma-red eyes that will make it look like I’ve been eating special brownies. I don’t want to stay with my own sister, either, who lives forty-five minutes to the east. We’ve found this to be a nice buffer distance, which is why my brother lives forty-five minutes to the west. My siblings and I don’t have much to say to each other and interact mostly on holidays at our parents’ house, which sits an hour north.
“Actually, I think I should confront him.” I’m so brave, I impress myself. “Yes, that’s what I must do. I can’t let him get away with intimidating me like this.”
Brandy gasps. “No!”
“You’ve got to break it off.” Melissa’s eyes are black and predatory. She leans in so close to me that I revisit the grapefruit she ate for lunch.
“Naomi. You have to break up with him. There’s no other choice. Do it now. Text him.”
“Yeah, don’t break up with him to his face,” Zach advises. “I once dated a surgeon and I drove across state lines before I left a voicemail saying we were breaking up. This is the same shit; Nicholas is right at home with sharp tools. Those tooth-scraper things could be like a scalpel to the jugular if you know what you’re doing. He could turn out to be the Sweeney Todd of dentists.”
I know Zach doesn’t believe a word of what he’s saying, but I get a flicker of slasher-film Nicholas in his white lab coat, eyes glowing red over a hypoallergenic face mask, wielding doll-sized weapons. He’s high on bubble-gum-flavored laughing gas and in the fog of his zombiefied brain all he can remember is that I insulted his tie.
“If you don’t see me tomorrow, it’s because I’m dead,” I say.
Zach reminds me that we don’t work tomorrow, Leon does.
“If you don’t see me Wednesday, it’s because I’m dead.”
“Okay. We’ll wait till Wednesday to call the police, then.”
I chew my fingernails. Fuss with the flowers even though they might be poisonous. They’re so pretty that it’s hard not to. Nicholas is pretty, too.
His pretty face will be the last one I see before I drift from this life. I’m only twenty-eight and I’ve barely done or seen anything. I hear his voice, my memory curling its edges into a taunt. You’re barely living, you know.
I’ve got to destroy these murder flowers.
We’re running around like animals escaped from the zoo, trying to figure out how to get them out of the store without touching them.
Melissa, Brandy, and I are staunch feminists but today we turn our backs on equality by playing the help-me-I’m-just-a-girl card, and vote Zach to take one for the team.
He sets his mouth in a grim line and risks it all like a trooper. We package his arms in plastic bags, all the way up to the shoulders, and secure them in place with rubber bands. We pull up his collar to cover his nose and mouth.
He runs back and forth from the counter to a burn barrel Mr. Howard keeps out back for getting rid of leaves and twigs, and I think he might be a bit of a pyromaniac when he dumps a whole bottle of lighter fluid over the flowers and throws in a match. He stands there and watches the flames, hypnotized, while Melissa shouts at him that the fumes might be poisonous, too.
I know for sure that he doesn’t believe anything we’re doing here when he ignores her and starts tossing other stuff into the barrel to watch it burn.
Old newspapers. A Dr Pepper bottle. Receipts from his jacket pocket.
When he starts melting pennies, we give up on him and turn away from the back door.
Brandy and I scrub down the counter and floors with bleach, stopping every now and then to check each other’s pupils and heart rates. It’s too bad I couldn’t keep the flowers. They were aromatic, almost like lotion or perfume. Even the burning smelled sweet before Zach topped it off with garbage.
He tires himself out after an hour and pours water over a smoking hill of debris before nudging it to the other side of the parking lot with a hockey stick. We pass the rest of our shift with games of tic-tac-toe we draw in the sand of a miniature Zen garden. We take a few BuzzFeed quizzes and I find out that if I were a supernatural creature I’d be a poltergeist. Brandy gets phoenix. I retake the quiz a few more times, experimenting with my answers, until I also get phoenix. By the time we clock out, we’ve forgotten about our brush with death.
Then I get a chime from my phone.
Did you not get the flowers?
Nicholas’s text reminds me that he’s the evil villain in my story and I should drive forty-five minutes in either direction to recover from my trauma at a sibling’s house. I purse my lips and reply.
If you’re asking whether I’m alive, the answer is yes. Nice try! I incinerated them.
He texts back right away.
WTF DID YOU ACTUALLY BURN THEM
“Of course,” I huff to nobody, all alone in my car. The vents are still blowing out cold air and I’ve had the heat running for ten minutes. His damned Maserati has heated seats that make you feel like you’re sitting in the devil’s lap.
What else would I do with oleander?
He replies: You didn’t do anything with oleander, seeing as how I gave you jasmine.
I squint at my screen, trying to decide whether I believe him. I didn’t know until recently that Nicholas is a talented actor, so it’s hard telling.
After a break of two minutes, he adds: If it HAD been oleander, burning it would’ve been a really stupid idea. JSYK. Oleander’s toxic. He’s Googled it, too. There’s no way he knew that off the top of his head.
Nicholas is fond of researching things and pretending that whatever obscure trivia he unearths is common knowledge. He watches Jeopardy! to show off (and because he’s an eighty-year-old man trapped in the body of a Disney prince), getting a high every time he delivers the correct answer before a contestant does. Then he glances sideways at me to make sure I’m impressed. If I get up to leave the room, he pauses the show until I return so that I don’t miss a moment of his genius.
Another text lights up my screen. It is ridiculously over the top, even for you, to make the leap from “Oh, my boyfriend sent me flowers” to
“Oh, my boyfriend’s trying to poison me.” JSYK, if I were actually going to poison you I could find a cheaper method.
“Just so you know” is how he says “duh” to people without getting smacked. If I destroy him before he destroys me, I’m making sure his epitaph says JSYK, dummies, it’s a myth that your hair and nails keep growing after you die.
I’m the only one left in the Junk Yard’s parking lot, watching my breath puff out in this metal icebox and dreading going home. To stall, I look up the significance of jasmine in the language of flowers and hunt for hidden subtext like a sentimental Victorian paramour.
There are many different types of jasmine. I don’t know precisely which strain he got for me. Most of the symbolism is typically romantic. I doubt Nicholas is aware that flowers even have meanings, or that he would choose one deliberately for a symbolic message I wouldn’t know unless I looked it up. He probably had the receptionists at Rise and Smile find the closest florist and told them to choose whatever was on sale today.
I can see his frown. A shake of the head. Impractical. He knows exactly how much gas he could have put in his tank for the cost of that jasmine.
He knows its conversion rate for groceries or our cell phone bill.
I catch myself lamenting that I didn’t keep at least one flower before remembering there’s no point. I never should have brought up the whole jag about not getting flowers from him. I’m not at all gratified by the jasmine, because I had to nag to get it, and he didn’t send it out of love. He sent it because he felt obligated, just like he does for his mother. But where Deborah can somehow still derive satisfaction from that, I can’t.
It’s an empty gesture, a dark condemnation. In all the places it’s supposed to please, it stings instead.
It’s Tuesday, and something’s up with Nicholas. He called the office to say he wouldn’t be coming in, then left the house without a word to me. He’s been gone all day. While I check my phone for calls or texts and wait for him to come home, I wander from room to room. It’s a short tour, because our house is small. It fits two people if those two people love each other and don’t mind being close. In the near future, it will fit one person comfortably.
My phone rings and I jolt, expecting to be told Nicholas surrenders and is never coming back, but it’s Mrs. Howard.
I steel myself before answering. I love Mrs. Howard, but she has the voice of two bricks grating against each other from fifty years of chain-smoking Virginia Slims.
“Hi, this is Naomi.”
I say that specifically because she always asks—and then she still does, anyway: “Is this Naomi?”
“Yes.”
“Hon, this is Goldie Howard.”
I smile. “Hello. How are you?”
“Dear, I’m great. Actually, not so great. You got a minute?”
My heart sinks into my stomach. Last hired, first fired. It’s curtains for me. “Uhh, yes. Just, uhh …” I reach for a notepad and pen for some reason. My brain buzzes. Paranoia, anxiety, and nausea pull me into their familiar huddle and squeeze. “Yeah, what’s up?”
She launches right in. “I’m sure you know that business at the Junk Yard isn’t what it was twenty years ago.”
“It’s … not that bad,” I squeak.
“Hon, it’s that bad. Melvin and I have been going over the books, and it looks like we’ve got no choice but to clean house.”
I can’t cry. Mrs. Howard has been so good to me, and I won’t make her feel any guiltier for doing what she has to do. “You’re letting me go.”
“I’m letting everybody go. We’ll move some stuff around, relocating what’s left on the shelves to our other businesses, but we’ll be closed down by mid-November. I’d sell the Junk Yard the way it is to a new owner, but Morris real estate is in a slump.”
She’s right. After she closes the store, it’ll probably sit there empty for ages before some optimistic sucker turns it into a bakery that won’t last six months. All of our small businesses are closing and Morris will be a ghost town in ten years.
“We’re trying to see what else we can do for you kids,” Mrs. Howard says kindly. “We’ve always got a few different irons in the fire. I do burlesque, Melvin’s an ordained minister. We go to a bunch of Midwestern fairs in the summer and do the carnie thing. And then there’s Eaten Alive and House of Screams.” She clears her throat, making me think of brick dust drifting loosely down a chimney. “I know Tenmouth is out of the way for that boyfriend of yours, but if you want to move here, we’ll line something up for you.”
I envision myself with a mask and chainsaw, jumping out at patrons in a haunted house. Or with a mask and chainsaw at Eaten Alive, gutting gelatin desserts inspired by The Blob. I think about my decision not to get a college degree and Nicholas telling me I don’t need to work.
This is what my life has come to.
“Thanks, Mrs. Howard. That’s a really generous offer.”
“Think about it, okay? You don’t have to let me know yet. Take your time, talk to your boyfriend. If you decide no but you eventually change your mind, give me a call. I think Melissa’s interested in being a line cook at Eaten Alive, so there’ll be somebody there you know.”
The diner option dissolves before my eyes. House of Screams it is.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. Her voice is even thicker than usual, and I think she might be crying. “We did everything we could. It’s hard out there. There aren’t many steady, decent-paying jobs available, and I know we couldn’t offer you kids any benefits or overtime, but at least there was something. You should’ve seen us twenty years ago. Full parking lot, every day.”
I try to picture that, and I can’t. I’ve never seen the second row of parking spaces occupied. The four or five employee vehicles taking up room lends the illusion that we’re semibusy.
“It’s all right, I understand,” I rush to say. “I’m grateful you hired me in the first place. I’ve had a lot of fun there.” Nostalgia sweeps over me and my voice crumbles like Mrs. Howard’s. “Thanks for the notice.”
“Take care, hon.”
We disconnect the call, and I have no idea what I’m going to do now.
I’ve got one, maybe two paychecks coming that will need to be stretched out to invisible fibers. I know what I would do if there were no Nicholas in this scenario: I’d start packing for Tenmouth and dedicate myself to a career of fake gore and screaming soundtracks, strobe lights in the darkness. Mopping up vomit and scrubbing graffiti. It’s a depressing prospect, but I can’t afford to be picky.
Even if I manage to get Nicholas to dump me and I end up with the house, I’ll have no way of paying rent. I desperately need to find a job close to Morris. I’ll get a roommate. Two roommates—we’ll become best friends and everything will be fine, just fine. That’s my plan A.
Uprooting to Tenmouth is plan B. Plan C is impossible with the noxious state of my relationship with Nicholas, so I don’t even consider it. I throw it out. Plan C is identity theft. I’ll enjoy a few relaxing weeks as Deborah Rose in my Malibu beach house before the feds track me down.
I’m still fretting over my quarter-life crisis when Nicholas barges in, big smile on his face. If I didn’t hate him already, that smile would be enough to seal the deal.
“Hello, Naomi,” he says gloatingly. Maybe he’s already heard about the Junk Yard.
I turn away. He walks to the fridge and opens it, whistling. I think about shoving him inside. He closes the fridge without pulling anything from it and stares in my direction; I know this because I can see him in my periphery, a smudge of browns and tan. He waits until I look at him, then starts laughing.
“What,” I snap.
My attitude thrills him. He angles a smirk at me, and it’s insufferable.
He knows something I don’t. I know something he doesn’t, too. I’ve put a squirt of Sriracha in his shaving cream.
“What,” I repeat, this time in a growl. He laughs louder, bracing a hand on the door frame like I’m so funny, he can barely hold himself up. This man is a lunatic. How did I wind up here?
The thought is so loud in my head, it ends up coming out of my mouth.
Nicholas takes a moment to consider it thoughtfully. “If memory serves, I asked a question and you said yes.”
And thus began my tale of woe. At least memory only serves one of us —thankfully, mine has been inked out with amnesia.
“How’d we even meet?” I marvel.
He wipes one eye with a knuckle, grinning crookedly. “I picked you up at a farmers’ market. From the top of the pile you looked nice. Wasn’t until I brought you home that I found out you were completely rotten on the inside.”
My mouth is shaped like a kiss, which sends the wrong message. I arrange it into a frown and say, “I’m telling your mother you say the F
word. She’ll make you go to church.”
He throws his head back and laughs some more.
“Where were you all day?”
He winks. “Miss me?”
“Not even.” My glance slides to the window, where I notice a Jeep Grand Cherokee parked in his spot. “The neighbors’ visitors blocked you out again. Too bad.” I don’t see his car, so he must be parked way down the street. Poor Dr. Rose had to walk in the rain.
He steps into my personal space to check outside. His hair is a little bit damp and smells fruity, like my conditioner. I’m going to start hiding my toiletries.
“Nope,” he says.
“Huh?”
He tucks a finger under my chin and lifts so that my mouth closes. “So beautiful,” he murmurs, eyes glittering. They’re the color of morning frost, and they’re having a laugh at my expense.
My heart starts thumping erratically from the way he’s looking at me.
I’ve been tuning out my attraction to him and suddenly it comes pounding back with a vengeance, until all I notice is the adorable curl of his hair, the sensual curve of his smile, the delicious notes of his cologne. He’s gorgeous and I hate him for spoiling it with his personality.
He follows up with, “Just as beautiful as the moment we first saw each other from across the room. On visitor’s day, at the prison.”
I swallow. “I’ll be headed back to prison soon, I’m sure.”
“I hear they offer classes. You could finally learn what the word regardless means.”
“It’ll be worth it, sleeping in the same room that holds my toilet, knowing you’re not around to ruin anyone’s life. Regardless.” I pause. I want to let this go, but I can’t. “Tell me where you were all day.”
“Take a guess.”
“Cheating, I hope. Make sure you leave evidence for me to find.”
His smile bends. Dries that way. I pick up a stack of junk mail and flip through Super Saver coupons, hmm-ing approvingly over discount items.
My favorite soap is two for one this week. Frozen pizzas are five for ten dollars. Nicholas is going to strangle me with his Toothless tie.
“What are you making for dinner?” he asks. Not What are we having.
It’s What are you making. The laugh is gone from his voice.
I don’t glance up. “It’s in the oven.”
I hear him pivot. There’s no timer on. No red light. He pulls down the oven door and it’s just as he suspected. “There’s nothing in here.”
I allow myself a tiny smile. I deserve it, after the day I’ve had. Not knowing what my fiancé is up to. Being let go from the best job I’ve ever had. The dreadful bangs that don’t look anything like Amélie’s. “That’s what I made. A whole feast of nothing, just for you.”
He grumbles all the way into his study. The lock clicks. Thirty minutes later, he emerges and stands at the front door.
“What are you doing?”
Nicholas casts me a disdainful look, like I’ve just asked the nosiest question. I hear a car door shut and seconds later, he’s got a box of pizza in his hands. Pizza for one. Well played, Nick.
He kicks the door shut and goes back to the study. I hurry to hide all the paper plates, hoping to inconvenience him, but he doesn’t care. He takes one of the good plates down from the cabinet and smiles at me as he rolls up a slice of pizza and eats half in one bite.
When he’s finished, he leaves his unused plate in the sink for me to wash.
