The whole office was quiet. The baby on the young woman's hip had stopped fussing. One of the Rimrock men had bent down and was picking up the coins that had rolled onto the floor and putting them in his palm.
Hiram Gilstrap put his hat down on the counter, crown-down, next to the pile of his grandson's lunch money. He looked down at the boy, who still would not look at him. Then he looked at Mrs. Ladd, and when he spoke it was not loud, but it was in a voice that carried, an outdoors voice, a voice for calling across a field, and every person in that office heard every word of it.
"Ma'am," he said, "I can't read it. I never could read. Not one word. My wife read for me for fifty-three years and now she's going blind, and my grandson here has been reading for me since August, and he's been reading me lies, because he loves me and he thought I couldn't stand the truth. And I let him. I never asked him once. Because I was ashamed." He put his big spotted hand on top of the boy's two small ones on the counter. "Well, I'm done being ashamed. I'm seventy-seven years old, and I'd like somebody to read me this paper. And I'd like it read to me true."
Nobody moved. Neva had thought, all the way down Main Street, that she was coming to read it for him. She saw now that it wasn't hers to read.
The boy had begun to cry. He did it the way his grandmother did, without making any sound, without moving anything but his mouth.
"Son," Hiram said, gently. "Would you read it to me."
Troy looked up at him at last. "Grandpa —"
"Read it to me. Every word. Read me the bad parts. I want to hear the bad parts in your voice so I know they're true."
So the boy wiped his face with the back of his wrist, and picked up the paper off the counter, and read it. He read it in the Oklahoma Natural Gas office on Main Street on the twenty-ninth of October 1982, in front of five strangers and Mrs. T. Ladd and the waitress from the Derrick Cafe, in a voice that shook at first and then didn't. He read the account number and the past-due balance and the late charge of four dollars and eighty cents, which could not be waived. He read the amount of the first installment, which was the money on the counter, and the amount of the next four, which was five dollars and seventy-two cents a month on top of the regular bill. He read that failure to make any installment when due would result in discontinuance of service without further notice. He stumbled on discontinuance and Mrs. Ladd said it for him, quietly, and he said it again after her and went on. He read every word down to the bottom, to the line where it said Signature of Account Holder, and then he put the paper down on the counter in front of his grandfather and said, in a small hoarse voice, "That's all of it, Grandpa. That's the true one."