"I don't care. Peanut butter."
From the den, without turning around, Boyce said, "Nobody in this house is eating on the county."
"It's not the county. It's the school."
"It's the government, then. Same thing." He still didn't turn around. "I paid in my whole life. I paid more taxes last year than my daddy made. I'm not going to go down there and fill out a paper telling them I can't feed my own kid."
"You wouldn't go down there. You'd sign it on the kitchen table."
"Then I'm not going to sign it on the kitchen table," Boyce said, and turned the sound up on the television, and that was the end of that conversation, the way it had been the end of it the last three times.
Neva knew about the colored tickets. Nobody had to tell her about the colored tickets. In Sayre, Oklahoma, in 1954, they had been red, and you got them from the principal's secretary on Monday morning in a little roll, five of them, and you lined up for lunch in the same line as everybody else, but when you got to the end, where Mrs. Hiatt sat at the card table with the cash box, you handed her a red ticket instead of a quarter, and she tore it in half and dropped one half in a coffee can and handed the other half back, and everybody behind you in line could see it, and so could everybody at the tables. There was a boy named Delmar Petty who used to hold up his quarter when he paid, high, between two fingers, like a man showing a policeman his badge. Neva had been a red-ticket kid for two years, fourth grade and fifth, until her mother got on at the glove factory in Elk City and they moved, and nobody in Elk City knew. She had never told Boyce. She had never told anybody. She had been forty-one cents' worth of shame a day for two years, and she was thirty-eight years old now and could still feel exactly where in her body she had kept it.
She lay awake that night next to Boyce, who slept now heavy and long like a man trying to sleep his way out of something, and thought about the grape jelly going into the boy's pocket. She thought about the forty cents on the counter, big to small. She thought about eighty-five cents counted into a palm one coin at a time under a magnifying glass, and the boy saying Pie's a dollar and a quarter, Grandma, and she did a sum she didn't want to do, which was how much a Social Security check came to for a man who had farmed cotton all his life and how far it went with three people eating off it. And she thought: that boy has not eaten lunch in a while. That boy is not eating lunch, and he is going to school with eighty-five cents in his pocket every day, and he is not eating lunch.
She could not make the second part make sense, so after a while she stopped trying, and slept.