Neva had done exactly that. Not with grape jelly, but with the little round tins of Vienna sausage that Mrs. Truscott sold for nine cents at the store in Sayre, in 1954 and 1955, when Neva was ten and eleven and her daddy was in the state hospital at Norman and her mother was cleaning motel rooms out on the highway for fifty cents a room. She had done it with saltines. She had done it with a banana once, and eaten it behind the Baptist church in four bites, and felt sick afterward, not from the banana. She knew the move. She knew the hands flat on the counter after, one on top of the other, like you were holding something down.
She didn't say anything. She went back into the kitchen.
Coy was at the flattop with his transistor on the shelf playing Merle Haggard low. Neva got a brown paper sack off the stack by the walk-in and made a sandwich without thinking about it, a slab of Saturday's meatloaf, cold, with ketchup, on white bread, folded in wax paper. She put in a red apple, two of the oatmeal cookies Coy's wife baked, a carton of milk, and rolled the top of the sack down twice.
"That a to-go?" Coy said, not turning around.
"It's leftovers."
"Ain't no ticket on it."
"It's leftovers, Coy," Neva said, and Coy turned his eggs and said nothing else, because Coy had been cooking for twenty-six years and knew the difference between a question and a conversation.
When she came out, Hiram was laying his forty cents on the counter, quarter, dime, nickel, big to small. Velma had her purse open on her lap and was feeling around in it for her coin purse, and when she found it she clicked it open and took out some coins and counted them into the boy's palm, holding each one up to her magnifying glass first. "That's your lunch money," she said. "Eighty-five. Don't lose it."
"Yes ma'am."