So on Saturday at two o'clock in the afternoon, the twenty-third of October, Neva Haskett took off her apron and hung it on its hook and went out the front door of the Derrick Cafe in her coat, and walked across the lot to where the pecan-colored Galaxie was parked at the far end by the dumpster with its engine off and an old man sitting in it behind the wheel in a gray felt hat, and she opened the passenger door and got in.
The car smelled like Velma's face powder and Prince Albert tobacco. There was a Bible on the dashboard and a pair of white cotton gloves. Hiram sat with his hands on the wheel at ten and two and looked out the windshield at the back wall of the cafe.
"She's at the beauty shop?" Neva said.
"She's at her sister's. I told her I had to see a man about the car." He was quiet for a while. "First time I ever lied to her that I recall. Fifty-three years."
Neva took the paper out of her coat pocket and unfolded it on her knee. She didn't say anything. She thought it would be worse for him if she said it. She thought he ought to be the one to decide what got said.
He looked at the paper for a long time, sideways, out of the corner of his eye, the way you'd look at a dog you weren't sure of.
"I can read numbers," he said finally. "I want you to know that. I can count money and I can read a scale and a thermometer and a price. I can read my name. I can write it. Took me most of a winter to learn to write it, in 1931, my wife taught me, so I could sign the papers on the farm. I can read STOP. I can read MEN, on a door, and WOMEN. I know the Twenty-third Psalm by heart and if you open the Bible to it I can follow along with my finger and you'd think I was reading it." His hands tightened on the wheel. "That's what I can do. That's the whole of it."
"Yes sir," Neva said.
"My daddy took me out of school in the second grade to pick cotton. Nineteen-twelve. There was nine of us. I never went back." He breathed in through his nose. "Velma read. Fifty-three years, she read for me. The mail. The contracts. The newspaper, out loud, after supper, every night of our married life. She read me the Gone With the Wind one winter, and I didn't think much of it." Something moved in his face. "Then her eyes went. It's been coming on two years and this summer it went the rest of the way. And we got the boy."