"That boy's daddy," he said finally. "He was offshore?"
"Morgan City. He got laid off the first of September."
"With about two hundred others," Boyce said. It wasn't a question. He was looking at his hands. "I know what that letter looks like. I've wrote that letter in my head about forty times since August. Who to, I don't know. You, maybe." He turned the cup. "Sleeping in a car. That's the part, isn't it. I don't know where I'd take him. That's what you say when you've got all the way to the bottom of it."
"Boyce."
"I'm not saying anything," he said, and went to bed. But when she went in after him he was lying on his back in the dark with his eyes open, and he said, without turning his head, "How many days is it? Eighty-five cents."
"Since school started? About thirty-five. Thirty-six."
"And he never ate."
"Not till I started giving him the sack."
Boyce lay there in the dark and didn't say anything else. After a while she felt his hand come across the sheet and find hers and hold on to it, hard, the way Hiram had held it at the cafe. He didn't let go until he was asleep.