QUAKER OLD FASHIONED 18OZ 1
NO SALT PEANUT BUTTER 1
Seven lines. Twenty-three dollars and eighteen cents. PAYMENT: EBT SNAP. He looked into the tote. A loaf of bread, slightly squashed. The milk, the eggs, the oatmeal, the peanut butter, the bananas going spotted. One can of Campbell's still inside. The other was in his hand. He looked at the paper sack, still folded over, and he did not open it, because he already knew, and because opening it would have been one more thing to do with his hands that he had no right to do.
Everything she had ordered was there. Nothing that had come out of the girl's backpack was on the list.
He stayed kneeling for a moment longer than he needed to. He found he did not want to stand up and look at either of them.
"She stopped ordering the chicken," the man said. "You know that? After the first time it got taken. She told Del she just didn't feel like chicken anymore." He said it flatly. "She cooked in school cafeterias for thirty years. She used to roast a chicken every Sunday of her life. She stopped ordering it because she couldn't afford to lose it twice, and she couldn't stand anybody knowing why."
"She told me," Kurt said. He heard his own voice from a long way off. "She told me that. About the chicken."
"Then what did you think was going on?"
He did not answer. There was not an answer that would survive being said out loud.
"It's three fifty-eight," the girl said. She had turned her face out of her father's shirt. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks wet, and she was looking past Kurt at the folding table and the mess on it with an expression of real anguish that had nothing to do with him at all, and that was somehow worse than if it had. "Daddy, the elevator's working today. She's going to come down. She always comes down at four when it's working. Please. We can still put it back. If we're fast we can still put it back."