The back had been written on, in pencil, in the same round print. Down the left side was a column of numbers. Each one was 85. Next to each, a little tick mark, like a man keeping score at dominoes. Some of them had dates beside them, 9/7, 9/8, 9/9, and then the dates stopped and there were only ticks and 85s, going down the page and up to the top again in a second column, and in a third. Here and there among them was something else. CANS 1.10. CANS .65. MOWED MRS O 2.00. Under the third column there was a line drawn with a ruler, and under the line, added and carried and added again, with a lot of erasing, was a total: 34.95.
And across the very top of the back, above everything, written larger and gone over twice so that the pencil shone, it said:
ONG 61.40
NOV 1
Neva stood on the back step in the north wind and read it three times. Then she folded it along its old folds and put it in her apron behind her order pad, and for the rest of the shift she could feel it against her hip, like something warm.
She didn't understand it. She understood the front: a boy who needed a free lunch, an application nobody had filled out, a name written in and taken off again. She could even see why an old man might bring it to the waitress who'd been putting food in the boy's bag, to fill out for him, if his wife's eyes were bad. But then why not just ask her? Why close her hand over it like he was passing her a note in church? Why tell me tomorrow, as if there were something in it she would need a night to understand?
And then the back. The 85s. She knew what 85 was. 85 was the coins Velma Gilstrap counted into the boy's palm every morning under the magnifying glass. That's your lunch money. Don't lose it.
At two o'clock, while she was refilling the ketchups, it came to her what ONG was, and she stood there with a bottle in each hand and said, "Oh," out loud, so that Coy looked up from the grill. ONG was Oklahoma Natural Gas. It was printed in blue at the top of the bill that came to her own house on Pioneer Road every month, Oklahoma Natural Gas Company, with the little flame. She had paid it at the office on Main Street a hundred times.
"You all right?" Coy said.