After a while she got in her car and went back to work. Ancel took off her apron and handed it back to her and said, "Well?" and she said, "It's on," and he nodded, and went back into the kitchen, and that was all.
Kristi cried that night at the kitchen table, the first time Neva had seen her cry since the summer. She had sat down beside him, she said. She'd sat down beside the Camel in front of the whole fifth grade, and some boys had made the noise, and she'd told them to shut up, and then she'd told Troy, because she wanted him to know somebody knew, that her mama said he was the bravest person in the building, and that her mama knew all about the gas bill and his granddaddy and everything, and it would be all right. "And he just looked at me," Kristi said, "like I'd hit him. And he got up and left." She put her face in her arms. "I was trying to be nice."
"I know you were, baby," Neva said, and put her hand on the back of her daughter's neck, and thought that it was the oldest thing in the world, and the hardest: that the kindest thing you can do for a proud person is very often the thing they can least bear to have done.
On Saturday morning the Gilstraps came into the Derrick at ten after seven, though there was no school, and sat on their three stools, and Hiram took the free lunch application out of his shirt pocket, crumpled and soft as cloth, and smoothed it flat on the counter. Neva gave the boy a pen. He read every line out loud, and his grandfather answered, and his grandmother added things, and the boy wrote. Names. Household members, three. Social Security, four hundred and twelve dollars a month. Other income, none. When he got to the line about Lyndell Breaux he looked up, and Hiram said, "Write down none, son. That's the truth this month," and the boy wrote it. At the bottom Hiram signed his name, slowly, tongue between his teeth, and Neva saw Tooter Sikes, three stools down, stop chewing and watch him do it with a look on his face she couldn't read.
On Monday Tooter came in with a paper of his own. It was a letter from the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission, and he laid it on the counter beside his cup and said, not looking at anybody, "Neva, would you see what this says. I left my glasses home." He had never worn glasses in his life. She read it to him, quietly, at the end of the counter, and didn't tell anyone.
She filled out her own that night. She sat at the kitchen table with the derrick magnet beside her and wrote Kristi Haskett, 6th grade, on the first line, and kept writing, and when she got to the box at the bottom for the signature of an adult household member she stopped, and sat there, and Boyce came in from the den in his sock feet and stood behind her and read it over her shoulder. She waited for him to say something about the county. He didn't. He took the pen out of her hand and leaned down and signed it himself, Boyce L. Haskett, in his big square driller's hand, and put the pen down, and went to the refrigerator and took out the can of Coors that had been sitting in there unopened for nine weeks, and looked at it, and put it back.
"Halliburton," he said, "in Odessa. I called them Friday. I'm driving down Wednesday."
"There's four hundred men."
"Then I'll be four hundred and one," Boyce said.