And she knew that since the end of August they'd had the boy with them. Troy was their daughter's boy, ten, in the fifth grade on the west side. The daughter had been killed in a car wreck on the interstate near Sayre in 1979, and the boy's father, a roughneck from Louisiana who'd come up for the boom, had gone back down to the Gulf that summer to work offshore because there wasn't anything left to work on here. So now the boy lived with his grandparents. They drove him to school in a 1966 Ford Galaxie the color of a pecan, and on the way they stopped at the Derrick for Hiram's twenty minutes of coffee, and the boy sat on the third stool and spun it a quarter turn left and a quarter turn right and drank a glass of water and said he'd already eaten.
He said it every morning. "No ma'am, I already ate." He said it the way kids say yes ma'am, fast, before you'd finished the question.
He was a thin, careful, brown-haired boy with his father's dark eyes and somebody's big ears and a cowlick in the back that Velma licked her palm and pressed down every morning at the counter and that sprang up again before she'd got her hand back in her lap. He wore the same two shirts, alternating, and jeans let down at the hem so there was a pale line around each ankle, and carried an army-surplus book satchel with a strap lengthened with baling twine. And he read. He read everything. He read the specials board out loud for his grandparents every morning, standing up on the rung of the stool to see it over the pie case, and the headlines off the Daily Oklahoman, and once, memorably, the entire health department certificate in the frame by the register, until Hiram put a hand on his shoulder and said, "That'll do, son."
"Chicken-fried steak," Troy read, that Monday morning, standing on the rung. "With cream gravy and mashed potatoes and a roll, three ninety-five. Beef tips on rice. Navy bean soup with cornbread. Pie of the day is coconut cream." He sat back down and spun a quarter turn. "Coconut cream, Grandma."
"That's your granddaddy's favorite," Velma said.
"I know it."
"We'll have to come back for lunch one day and get your granddaddy a piece of that coconut cream."
"Pie's a dollar and a quarter, Grandma," the boy said, not loudly, and spun the stool back the other way.
Neva was at the coffee urn with her back to them, and she didn't turn around, but she heard it. She heard the way he said it, with no complaint in it at all, just information, the way a man reads off the fuel gauge. She had a daughter of her own, twelve, and in twelve years Kristi had never once known what anything cost unless she wanted it.