"Dear Mr. and Mrs. Gilstrap," she read. "I am sorry I have not wrote in a while and sorry about the money. I want you to know I have not forgot. The Gulf has gone bad too, they are laying off the crew boats and I got let go the 1st of September with about two hundred other men. I have been sleeping at my cousin's in Amelia and going every day to the hiring halls and there is just nothing. They say maybe Saudi but you have to have the papers and I don't. I will send what I can when I can, I swear to God I will. I know it isn't right to leave Troy on you, and if you can't keep him you tell me and I'll come get him somehow, but I don't know where I'd take him right now and I'd rather he was with you than with me sleeping in a car. Please tell him I love him and I am trying. Please don't tell him the rest. Your son-in-law, Lyndell." She swallowed. "And there's a P.S. It says, Tell him I will call when I can afford it. Tell him LSU is going to beat Alabama."
Velma Gilstrap began to cry. She did it silently, without moving anything but her mouth, her hands folded on the oilcloth.
"What did Troy tell you that one said?" Neva asked, though she thought she knew.
"He said his daddy got a raise," Hiram said. "He said his daddy was coming home for Christmas and bringing him a bicycle. A red one. A Schwinn." He looked at the letter in Neva's hand without seeing it. "He read it so good. He read it like he was reading it right off the page. He even did the part about LSU."
"He left that part in," Neva said.
"He left in what was true that wouldn't hurt nobody," Velma said, through the crying, and laughed, a small terrible laugh. "That's my grandson. Lord help us. That's LaDonna all over. She used to do that. She'd break a dish and tell you about it so sweet you'd thank her."
Neva sat with the letter. She thought about a ten-year-old boy at this table in the evenings, opening these envelopes with a butter knife, reading them to himself first, the way she just had. Reading Final notice. Reading Please don't tell him the rest. Then looking up at the two old faces waiting for him, the one that couldn't see and the one that couldn't read, and deciding, all by himself, what they could stand to hear, and making the rest up out of his own head, with the LSU part left in so it would sound true. And then going to bed in the little back room and lying there doing arithmetic. Thirty-eight ten. Sixty-one forty. Eighty-five cents times the number of school days until November first.
"He wasn't lying to you," she said. "Not the way you'd think."
"I know how he was lying to me," Hiram said. "He was lying to me because I couldn't do for my own self what a boy in the fifth grade could do. He was lying to me because he figured if I knew, it'd kill me." He set both hands on the table, flat, the way the boy did on the counter, one on top of the other. "And he might be right. I'm seventy-seven years old. I farmed a half section for forty-five years and never missed a note at the bank. I buried my daughter. I never once in my life been behind on a bill. And I been sitting at this table every night for two months letting a child tell me fairy stories, and saying, Well good, son, well that's fine, and going to bed." His voice cracked across the middle like a board. "He's been going hungry so I'd have hot water. He's been going hungry so I could keep on not knowing."