"Hiram," Velma said.
"I'm going to fix it," the old man said. "Before I say a word to him. I'm going to go down there to the gas office and fix it, and then I'm going to sit him down and tell him I know, and tell him it's fixed, so he don't have to carry it no more. He's not going to carry it one more day than he has to. I'll not have him find out from somebody else that I know and think I'm sitting here ashamed of him."
"I can go with you," Neva said. "I can take my break. Or my day off is Tuesday."
"No ma'am." He shook his head, slowly. "You read it to me. That's what I needed. I know what it says now. I can go in and talk to a woman at a counter. I been talking to people at counters my whole life." He looked at the pink notice. "Sixty-one forty. I got twenty-two dollars in the sugar bowl and the check comes the third. I'll go Friday, after I pay the beauty shop. I'll tell them they'll have the rest on the third. A man can make an arrangement. It says right there, arrangements."
"It does say that."
"Then that's what I'll do," Hiram Gilstrap said, and put the letters back in the shoebox one by one, in order, the way the boy had kept them, and put the lid on.
When she got home Boyce was asleep in the recliner with a preacher on channel nine and the unopened can going warm beside him. Neva went into the kitchen and took the free lunch paper down off the refrigerator and found a ballpoint and held it over the line that said Student Name(s) and School. Then she capped it again and put the paper back up. She could see the inside of her own hand at the end of a lunch line in Sayre in 1954 with a red ticket in it, and Delmar Petty holding up his quarter.
On Thursday night, while Kristi was in the bath, she told Boyce. He asked her, out of nowhere, whether something had happened at work, because she'd been different all week, and she put down the sponge and told him. Not the names. An old man who couldn't read, a boy reading the mail to his grandparents and making it all come out fine. Eighty-five cents a day in a can. The letter from Morgan City, and the red Schwinn that wasn't coming.
Boyce listened all the way through with his big red hands around a cup of coffee, and when she was done he didn't say anything for so long that she picked the sponge back up.