"Oh." The girl considered this. "Is he poor?"
Neva looked at the piece of paper on the refrigerator door, under the magnet, waving a little in the draft from the vent.
"I don't know what he is," she said.
She lay awake again that night with the paper on her chest in the dark and her hand flat on top of it, putting the pieces together the way she did the arithmetic. A boy who would not eat lunch. Who had eighty-five cents put in his hand every morning to buy one, and was writing the eighty-five down, and collecting cans, and adding it all up under a ruler line, under the name of the gas company and a date.
The gas bill. He was paying the gas bill. A ten-year-old boy was starving himself at the end of the fifth-grade table while the other children made camel noises, and putting his lunch money in a can, so that he could pay his grandparents' gas bill by the first of November.
But that made no sense either, because Hiram Gilstrap was a proud, careful old man who stacked his forty cents big to small, and if his gas bill was past due he would know it. He would have the pink notice in his hand. He would never let a boy carry it.
Unless he didn't know about it.
Unless he had the bill and didn't know what it said.
She thought about Velma putting the menu down having read nothing. About the boy up on the rung every morning reading the board out to them. Pie of the day is apple. About Hiram Gilstrap, who had sat at her counter for seven weeks with the Daily Oklahoman at his elbow and never once picked it up, who never once looked at a menu.