She came down the counter with the pot and topped off Hiram's cup, though he had only drunk a third of it, because topping it off was a thing to do with her hands. "How about you, hon," she said to the boy. "You want a little orange juice? On the house. I got a pitcher that's going to turn on me."
"No ma'am, I already ate."
"What'd you have?"
He looked at her. It was a quick look, a check, the way a dog looks at you when you've said its name in a tone it hasn't heard before. "Cereal," he said.
"What kind?"
"Cheerios."
"Those are good," Neva said, and went back up the counter, and set the pot on the burner, and stood there a minute with her hand on the handle.
She had watched him for six weeks without watching him, the way you notice a thing out of the corner of your eye for a long time before you turn your head. She had noticed that the bowl of oyster crackers she kept on the counter for the soup was always empty at that end when the Gilstraps left. She had noticed the little bright paper squares of sugar packets in his fingers, torn at one corner, and that he did not put them in his water. She had noticed that he watched the plates. Not the food on the plates — the plates. When she cleared a plate from in front of one of the truckers with half a biscuit and a piece of bacon still on it, his eyes went with it all the way down the counter and through the pass-through window to the bus tub, and then came back, and he spun his stool a quarter turn and looked at the pie case like he'd been looking at it all along.
But what turned her head was the jelly. That Monday morning, while Velma was saying something to Hiram about the electric co-op and Hiram was nodding, she saw Troy put his hand into the little wire rack of jelly packets by the napkin dispenser and take two grape and slide them into the front pocket of his jeans in a single motion, smooth as a card trick, without looking down. Then he put both his hands flat on the counter, one on top of the other, and kept them there.