On Thursday my grandmother made plov for twenty guests in a pot the size of a bicycle wheel. She put the pot in the cold room and closed the door.
On Friday morning she stood in that doorway with her hands on her hips.
"Somebody has been eating my plov," she said.
My brother looked in the pot. "It's still full."
"Look at it properly," she said. "Nobody has eaten the plov — it is still here. But somebody has been eating it. Every night, a little. And that is a completely different person."
That was the clue. A thief takes everything once. A hungry person takes a little, often.
My brother said a cat. My grandmother pointed at the marks on the top of the rice. "A cat doesn't use a spoon."
On Saturday night I hid behind the door of the cold room with a blanket.
At eleven o'clock the door opened. A boy from the end of our street came in with a small plate. He is twelve. He has been living with his aunt since March, and his aunt works nights at the hospital.
He filled the plate, closed the pot carefully and went out.
I ran to the kitchen. My grandmother was awake at the table with her tea.
"I know," she said. "I have been leaving that door open for eleven days."
"So you haven't been sleeping at all?"
"I have slept," she said. "I have also been counting. He takes one plate. Never two. That is a boy with a mother somewhere in his head."
On Sunday there were twenty-one places at our table. "I have made more rice," my grandmother said, and she said nothing else about it.
"I have been feeding a boy," she told me later. "Not a cat. And now he has eaten at my table, so he is a guest — and a guest comes back."