"No. I'm good at it."
He was. He did a whole column without a mark wrong. I told him I'd been good at long division too, at St. Nicholas, before I quit at sixteen to work the counter at the Isaly's when my mother had her first little stroke, and he said, "Oh," and put his pencil down for a second, and then picked it up again.
Marge Feeney came in at three-thirty that day to pick up her check. Marge was fifty-one, with red hair from a box and a laugh you could hear on the bridge, and she had raised four boys on tips and did not believe in anything she could not see with her own eyes, including Ohio Edison. She took one look at the boy at the end of the counter and pulled me into the back by the dish pit.
"Who's that?"
"A kid."
"I can see it's a kid, Dodie. Whose kid?"
"I don't know. He comes in after school. He came in yesterday."
"From where?"
"North side, he says. He takes the bus."
Marge looked at me the way she looked at a ten-dollar bill a customer swore was a twenty. "You feed him?"
"Stosh feeds him. I just carry it."