He put his hat on. Then he reached into the pocket of his white shirt, the left one, over his heart, and took out something that was folded small, and he took her right hand in his big dry spotted one, and turned it palm up, and put the thing in it, and closed her fingers over it with his own. He pressed down hard, so hard her knuckles hurt. He held on a second longer than he needed to.
"Would you look at that for me," he said, very low. "Tell me tomorrow."
"What is it?"
He didn't answer. He let go of her hand and went out the door with the bell jangling and across the sidewalk to the Galaxie, and opened the driver's door, and got in, and sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel. Then he backed out onto Third Street at four miles an hour and went away west.
Neva stood in the aisle with her fist closed. Tooter said something about coffee. She said in a minute. She went out the back door onto the step by the grease barrel where she took her breaks, into a north wind with the first teeth of the fall in it, and opened her hand.
It was a sheet of paper folded small, and it had been crumpled, really crumpled, balled up in a fist and then smoothed out, and it had been wet at some point and dried, so that it was soft as cloth and the ink had run in a tide line across one corner. When she unfolded it she knew what it was before she'd finished, because she had one just like it on her refrigerator under a magnet shaped like an oil derrick.
Elk City Public Schools. Application for Free and Reduced Price Meals, 1982–83 School Year.
Nothing on the front was filled in. Not the household members, not the income, not the signature. At the top, on the line marked Student Name(s) and School, somebody had written Troy Breaux, 5th grade, in pencil, in a careful round child's print, and then erased it, so you could still see the letters pressed into the paper like a fossil. That was all. The rest was blank, the chart, the boxes, the little paragraph in small type about prosecution under state and federal law.
She turned it over.