"And the boy reads for you," Neva said.
"The boy reads for us." Hiram looked at the paper on her knee. "Every night. He sits at the kitchen table and opens the mail and reads it out. Bills. Social Security. Letters from his daddy. He's a fine reader, ma'am. Reads like a preacher. We was proud of him." His voice went down to almost nothing. "I found that in his blue jeans, Monday last, when I was doing the wash. I do the wash now. It went through in the pocket and fell out on the ground when I hung them out. I could see it had the school on it, the little schoolhouse at the top. And I could see the numbers on the back. Eighty-five, eighty-five, eighty-five. And the sixty-one forty." He turned his head at last and looked at her. "I couldn't ask him. I couldn't ask Velma, she'd have to ask him. I sat out on the back step with it half an hour like a fool, thinking who I knew that would read it to me and not tell me it was something it wasn't."
"Why me?"
"Because you been feeding him," Hiram said simply. "I figured anybody that'd do that wouldn't lie to me about him."
Neva looked down at the paper. Then she read it to him. She read him the front, every word, the title and the chart and the lines and the box for the signature and the small type about state and federal law. She read him the name that had been written in and erased. Then she turned it over and read him the back, the 85s, the ticks, the dates, the cans and the mowing and the total under the ruler line, and then the top.
"ONG is the gas company," she said. "Oklahoma Natural Gas. I think he's saving up to pay your gas bill, Mr. Gilstrap. I think that's what the date is. I think somebody told him the gas would go off November first if it wasn't paid, and he's been putting his lunch money by."
Hiram didn't move for a long time. A truck went by out on Third Street, a big one, empty, its trailer banging. Then he said, in a voice she would remember for the rest of her life, flat and quiet and very far away:
"He read me that bill. The gas bill. He read it to me at the table. I asked him particular, because it was pink, and Velma said the pink ones mean trouble. He read it out to me. He said, Paid in full, thank you, Grandpa. Account current. He said that's what the pink was for. To say thank you."
The Gilstraps lived on the west side of town on a street of small frame houses built for the cotton-gin workers in the twenties, with deep porches and pecan trees and a water tower at the end of the block. Neva went there on Sunday evening at six, after Velma's sister Arvella had come by in her Buick and taken the boy to the evening service at First Baptist. Hiram had arranged it. He met her at the door in his white shirt and his house slippers, and he did not say anything, only held the screen door open, and she went in.