"I know it. Take it out of my check."
"I don't want to take it out of your check." He looked at the clipboard and not at her. "You know how many tabs I'm carrying right now? Forty-one. Every one of them a good man going to pay me back when the rigs go up again. I got the Doghouse sitting empty with a note on it I'll be paying till I'm dead. I got the bank calling me at supper." He shook his head, slowly. "I can't feed one, Neva. I'd like to. If I feed one, I got to feed all of them, and if I feed all of them I'm going to be in the line myself."
"It's one little boy."
"It's always one. Every one of them is one." He put the clipboard down. "I'm not telling you to quit. I'm telling you I can't do it. You understand the difference."
"I understand it."
"All right." He picked the clipboard back up and looked at it for a while, though she didn't think he was reading it. "Coy gave him a roast beef sandwich," he said. "Thursday."
"I didn't ask him to."
"I know you didn't. He told me. He said he'd pay for the beef." Ancel's long face did something, very briefly, that on another man might have been a smile. "That's the trouble with this business. Everybody's always paying for the beef." Then he went out to unlock the front door, and Neva stood by the prep table for a minute, and then got a paper sack off the stack, and made the sandwich, and wrote on a green ticket in pencil 1 BOLOGNA SAND — 1 MILK — 1 APPLE — NEVA, and rang it up herself out of her apron, a dollar and fifteen cents, and dropped the ticket in the box.
She did that every day for the rest of the week. It was a dollar and fifteen cents a day she did not have. She did the arithmetic at the kitchen table, in pencil, and it came out short, and she erased it, and it came out short again, and she left it.