On the second of November the state reelected George Nigh by a mile, and nobody at the counter could say what difference it would make. The rigs stayed stacked. Neva kept dusting the Doghouse sawhorse on Fridays. Lyndell Breaux called the Gilstraps collect from a payphone in Amelia, Louisiana, on a Sunday night, and Troy talked to him for six minutes, and afterward told his grandparents everything his father had said, the bad parts too. Velma's eye was still scheduled for January. The free lunch came through for Troy and a yellow reduced-price ticket came through for Kristi, who would not use it for a week and then, one Thursday, did, and came home and said nothing about it, which Neva understood was a great deal.
Mrs. Oberholtzer, it turned out, gave reading lessons on Tuesday nights at the Carnegie library, out of thin paperback books called Laubach Way to Reading. Hiram Gilstrap started the second week of November. On Wednesday mornings he laid the first book on the counter beside his saucer and worked at it for his twenty minutes with his finger under the words, and the boy sat beside him and did not help unless he was asked.
The first hard norther came through on the eighteenth of November, a wall of brown sky out of the Panhandle and then the temperature falling twenty-five degrees in an hour, and that morning the Gilstraps came in out of the wind with their collars up, and the boy read the board, and Hiram, for the first time, read it after him, one word at a time, very slowly, while the counter pretended not to listen. "Pie," he said. "Of the. Day." He looked at the next word for a long time. Then he gave up and smiled and said, "Coconut, I expect," and Coy, in the kitchen, laughed out loud.
When they got up to go, Neva came around the end of the counter with the sack, the way she still did on Wednesdays, though the boy ate in the cafeteria now with everybody else. Bologna, an apple, two cookies. A dollar fifteen. And Hiram stopped beside her in the aisle, and took her hand, and turned it palm up, and put something in it, and closed her fingers over it, and pressed.
"Tell me tomorrow," he said, and went out.
She opened it on the back step by the grease barrel, in the cold. It was the torn half of a blue cafeteria ticket, the kind Kristi said everybody knew. On the back of it, in pencil, in big wavering capitals, each letter made separately, with a little space between, the way a man sets fence posts, it said:
HE ATE
Neva stood on the step in the north wind for a long time with the ticket in her hand. Across the highway the stacked rigs lay in the Rimrock yard in their long rows, and the sky over them was hard and empty and blue, and somewhere in the house on Pioneer Road her husband was packing a duffel bag to drive to Odessa, and it was going to be a long winter, and nobody she knew could tell her how it would come out. She folded the ticket along its tear and put it in her apron pocket, behind her order pad, where she could feel it against her hip. Then she went back inside, because there was coffee to pour, and men at the counter waiting, and a piece of paper on the register from Mr. Kinsolving that he said he couldn't make heads or tails of, and wanted her to look at, when she got a minute.