The truck payment was two hundred and eighty-nine dollars a month. The bass boat was a hundred and twelve. The house was four hundred and six. Boyce's unemployment was a hundred and ninety-seven a week, for twenty-six weeks, and he had used up nine of them. Neva made a dollar seventy an hour from Ancel, which was under the minimum and legal because of the tips, and on a good week the tips came to about ninety dollars, and there had not been a good week since August. She did the arithmetic every night at the kitchen table in pencil, the way her mother had, and every night it came out short, and she erased it and did it again, as if the pencil might have made a mistake.
On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like an oil derrick that said ELK CITY — NATURAL GAS CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, was a piece of paper that had come home in Kristi's backpack the second week of September. Elk City Public Schools, it said across the top. Application for Free and Reduced Price Meals, 1982–83 School Year. It had a chart of household sizes and incomes, lines for names and Social Security numbers, a box at the bottom for the signature of an adult household member, and a sentence in small type about prosecution under state and federal law.
Neva had read the chart standing at the counter the day it came home. They were a household of three. If she went by what they'd actually had coming in since August, and not by what Boyce had made in March, they were under the line for reduced price, and close to the line for free. She had stood in her kitchen with the paper in her hand and felt her face go hot as if somebody had walked in on her in the bathtub.
She had put it on the refrigerator so she would remember to deal with it. It had been there for five weeks. Every time she opened the refrigerator door it waved at her a little in the draft.
"You talk to Boyce about that lunch paper yet?" she said to Kristi that evening, which was a stupid thing to say, a coward's way of asking her own husband something through a twelve-year-old, and she knew it the moment it was out of her mouth.
Kristi was at the table doing long division with her hair in her face. She was a pretty, sullen, long-legged girl who had been sweet until the summer and now treated both her parents like the help in a hotel she didn't think much of. "Why would I talk to Daddy about it," she said. "I'm not filling that out. Everybody'd know."
"Nobody would know. It's confidential. It says right on it."
"Mama. They have different color tickets." Kristi looked up at her with enormous scorn. "Regular is white. Reduced is yellow. Free is blue. Everybody knows what the blue ones are. Jennifer Gaskins gets blue and they call her Smurf." She went back to her long division. "I'll just take my lunch."
"In what, honey? What am I supposed to put in it?"