He came back the next day.
I'd told myself he wouldn't. I'd told myself, filling the sugars at six in the morning while the sky over the river went from black to the color of dishwater, that kids like that come once and you never see them again, and that was fine, that was the way it ought to be, you feed them and they go on, like birds. I said it to myself so many times that Stosh asked me who I was talking to.
At twenty-two minutes to four the bell rang and there he was, same jacket, same pompom tuft, same red bookbag set down on the stool beside him like a passenger. He sat on the wobbly stool at the end of the counter again. Before I could even get the water poured he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a fist and opened it on the counter, and there was a little pile of change: a quarter, a dime, and two pennies, one of them so old and brown you could hardly see Lincoln.
"Thirty-seven cents," he said. Not whispering this time. "That's what I have. I want to pay for something."
I looked at the thirty-seven cents. On a good day at Helen's Grill in 1984 thirty-seven cents would get you most of a cup of coffee, which was forty-five, or a single scoop of rice pudding with a sprinkle of cinnamon, which was thirty-five, which Helen had not raised since the Ford administration because she said rice pudding was a moral issue.
"You like rice pudding?" I said.
"I don't know."
"Well, you're about to find out. It's thirty-five cents. You'll have two cents change." I counted out the quarter and the dime and pushed the pennies back to him. "Hang on to those. That brown one's practically an antique."
He looked at the pennies, and at me, and I could tell he knew exactly what I was doing, that he knew rice pudding was not a meal, and I could also tell he had decided to let me do it, the way you let an adult win at Candy Land. Stosh, who had been listening, slid a grilled ham and cheese onto the pass about four minutes later without anybody ordering one and said, "Guy walked out," and I said, "Another one?" and he said, "Epidemic," and I set it in front of the boy, and he did not argue.
He had homework that day. He took it out of the bookbag after he ate, a blue folder and a pencil with the eraser chewed off, and a worksheet, long division, mimeographed in that purple ink that smelled like a headache, and he did it right there at the counter with his tongue in the corner of his mouth. I looked at the top of the sheet when I came by with the coffee for Lefty. CASEY R., it said, in careful capitals, and under it, Room 14, Mrs. Petrarca. Nothing else.
"You need help with that?"