"It's just leftovers, Mrs. Gilstrap."
"It's not leftovers, and I'm grateful to you for saying so. Hiram's grateful too. He won't tell you. He hasn't got the words for things like that. Never has." She patted Neva's hand twice. "That boy is so thin. I can feel his shoulder blades through his shirt when I hug him. I can't see him good anymore, but I can feel him. And I can't make him eat. I make him a plate every night and he eats half of it and says he's full and tries to give the rest to his granddaddy. I don't know what to do."
"He eats what I give him," Neva said. "I think he does. I don't see any of it coming back."
"Well, God bless you for that." The old woman took her hand away and put it back in her lap with the other one. "You have children?"
"A girl. Twelve."
"Then you know," Velma Gilstrap said, and then the restroom door opened and Hiram came out drying his hands on a paper towel, and she said nothing else, and neither did Neva.
Ancel Brumley found out on the following Monday. Neva had known he would. Ancel did inventory every Monday morning before the cafe opened, in the walk-in with a clipboard and a flashlight, counting cartons of milk and pounds of ground beef and heads of lettuce with the grim care of a man counting his own blood, and on Monday he came out of the walk-in at a quarter past six with the clipboard under his arm and said, "Neva. Come here a minute."
She went. He stood by the prep table in his white shirt and his clip-on tie, which he wore every day, boom or bust, because he said a man who owned a business ought to look like he did. He was sixty-two and bald with the long, decent face of a basset hound, and in nine years he had never once raised his voice to her.
"I'm five milks short and about two pounds of lunchmeat," he said. "And the apples."