Pearl looked at the list without touching it.
"We're short on flour," she said.
There were eleven sacks of flour stacked against the end of the counter. Nora could see the Ninnescah Mills stencil on the top one.
"I'll take whatever you can spare."
"We're short," Pearl said again, and her color rose. She was a stout, fair woman of forty who sang alto in the church choir and had bought a quart of Nora's honey every month for two years, and whose youngest boy Nora had sat up with through a croup when Pearl had been down with it herself. "It's all spoken for, Mrs. Tolliver. Everything in the store is spoken for. I'm sorry."
From the top of the ladder Hiram said, without turning around, "There's the Mexican store in Ledoux. They'll sell to anybody."
Nora picked up her list and folded it once and put it in her reticule.
"The Mexican store in Ledoux," she said, "sold to my husband for two years, Mr. Ostrander, and charged him a fair price, and never once asked where his money came from. You took it fast enough when he paid his account in this store. You never asked either."
The back of Hiram's neck went red. Pearl's mouth opened and shut.
"I don't believe you ever sold out of flour when it was Eli buying," Nora said, and went out, and the bell jingled cheerfully behind her.
On the gallery, a boy of ten or eleven was waiting for her, a towheaded boy she knew to be the son of one of the stamp-mill men. He had a rock in his hand. He did not throw it. He only stood there holding it and staring at her, and she understood that somebody had told him to throw it and that he had not been able to make himself do it, and that this would be the kindest thing to happen to her that week.
"Go on home," she told him. "Your mother will want you."