"Put it in your pocket where it won't fall out."
He put it in his other pocket, the one without the jelly.
Neva came around the end of the counter with the sack held down by her leg, and she stopped beside the boy's stool while he was climbing down and getting his satchel up over his shoulder, and she said, low, the way you'd say it to a man about his fly, "Hon, Coy made too much meatloaf Saturday and it's going to waste. Would you do me a favor and take this off my hands. I hate to throw it out."
He looked at the sack. He looked at her. He looked, fast, at his grandmother, who was getting up off her stool by stages with one hand on the counter and one on Hiram's arm, and then at his grandfather, who was putting on his hat, and who had stopped with his hat halfway to his head and was looking at Neva too.
"I already ate," Troy said.
"I know you did. It's for lunch. You can save your money." She opened the flap of his satchel and slid the sack in on top of a library book and a Big Chief tablet and closed the flap again before he could decide anything. "You'd be doing me a kindness. Ancel hates waste."
There was a long second. The boy's mouth did something complicated. Then he said, "Thank you, ma'am," very quietly, to the satchel strap.
Hiram Gilstrap finished putting on his hat. He did it slowly, setting it square with both hands, and then he looked at Neva for a moment longer from under the brim. He had pale blue eyes, washed out like old denim, and there was nothing in his face she could read at all. Then he nodded to her once, the kind of nod you give a man across a fence line, and took his wife's elbow, and the three of them went out with the bell jangling, and the old man backed the Galaxie out onto Third Street at about four miles an hour and drove away west.
"What'd you give that kid?" Tooter Sikes said.