"I know it."
Then he reached across and took the apron out of her hands and put it on himself, over his clip-on tie, and picked up the coffee pot. "Go on," he said. "I'll pour. It comes out of your Saturday."
The Oklahoma Natural Gas office was on Main Street between a shoe store with a going-out-of-business sign and a savings and loan. Neva parked the Pontiac half on the curb. Through the plate glass she could see the wood-paneled room, the counter with its three windows, and five people in line, a young woman with a baby on her hip and two men in Rimrock caps and an old woman in a church hat. And at the center window, with his gray hat in his hand and his back very straight, Hiram Gilstrap, standing in front of a heavyset woman in a brown cardigan and cat-eye glasses who was sliding a sheet of paper toward him across the counter.
And coming up the sidewalk from the other direction, at a dead run, with his satchel banging against his hip on its baling-twine strap and a red Folgers can held against his chest with both arms, was the boy.
He got to the door before she did. She saw him stop with his hand on the push bar and look in through the glass, and see his grandfather standing at the window, and go white. She saw him think about running. She saw him decide not to, which was the bravest thing she'd ever watched anyone do, and push open the door and walk in, and she came in right behind him and stopped just inside, by the chairs, where nobody would notice her, and stood still.
The boy went straight past the line. He went past the woman with the baby and the men in the Rimrock caps and the old woman in the church hat, and nobody stopped him, and he came up to the center window beside his grandfather and set the Folgers can on the counter and pried the plastic lid off with his thumbs and turned it upside down. The money came out in a heap. Quarters and dimes and nickels, mostly, and a lot of pennies, and some dollar bills folded small, and it went across the counter and some of it rolled off the edge onto the floor, and nobody in that office said a word.
"It's for Gilstrap," Troy said to the woman in the cardigan. His voice was shaking so hard it barely came out. "Hiram Gilstrap. On Walnut Street. It's thirty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents. I counted it. I'm going to have the rest. I can have the rest by — I can have it by —" He stopped. He couldn't say a date. He stood there with both hands flat on the counter on either side of the pile of coins, one on top of the other, and stared straight ahead at the woman's cardigan button, and did not look at his grandfather. "Please don't turn it off," he said. "My grandmother gets cold."
The woman in the cardigan looked at him over her glasses. Her name plate said MRS. T. LADD. She had a long, tired, Methodist face, and Neva would learn later that she had worked that window for twenty-two years, had seen gas bills paid in the boom with hundreds peeled off a roll and in the bust with jars of pennies, and had cut people off in both when it came to that, because the rules were the same for everyone, which was the only fairness she had ever been able to offer anybody.
"Young man," she said, "I can take this money. But I can't make the arrangement with you. You're not the account holder." She looked at Hiram. "Mr. Gilstrap here is. I've explained to him that we can put the service on a deferred payment agreement, but he'll need to read over the terms and sign it. He's been standing here looking at it for some time." She tapped the sheet of paper on the counter between them, not unkindly. "Mr. Gilstrap? Is there a problem with the agreement?"