Their small world had entirely collapsed, and Leo could list the collapse the way other boys could list baseball teams. The pantry was completely empty. Not almost empty. Not down to the last can. Empty, in the way a cupboard is empty when you open it and the shelves stare back at you and the only sound is the hinge. The electricity was scheduled to be shut off by Friday. Friday was a word that had started to feel like a wall at the end of the week. After Friday, there would be no fan in the heat, no light at night, no cold water in the fridge, even if there had been food to put in it. Leo had read the notice on the table twice, once aloud to Diane and once silently to himself, because he wanted to be sure he had not misunderstood. He had not misunderstood. Friday. Shut off.
He had spent the morning at the trailer, doing the small things a boy can do when the big things are broken. He had wiped his mother's forehead with the rag he kept in his back pocket, a reasonably clean scrap of cloth that had become, over the summer, a towel and a washcloth and a comfort all at once. He had brought her water in a chipped mug and set it where she could reach it without getting up. He had sat on the edge of her bed and told her, in a voice that tried to sound older than ten, that he would go to the diner and see what there was to see. Diane had looked at him for a long moment, and Leo had seen, in her eyes, the two things she always carried at once: love for him, and worry that love was not enough to fill a pantry.
You be careful, she had said, and her voice had been rough from coughing. "And you come straight back. No wandering far."
I will, Leo had promised. "I'll be careful. I'll come straight back."
Now he stood in the gravel parking lot of Henderson's Diner, a dilapidated roadside eatery that locals knew by its peeling sign and its good coffee and its lot full of trucks and tired cars. The lot was mostly empty in the early afternoon heat. A few cars sat with their windows cracked. A rusted dumpster stood at the back, smelling faintly of old grease in the sun. The diner's glass doors reflected the sky in a blinding white glare. Inside, Leo could hear the clink of plates and the low murmur of voices, and the sound made his stomach twist harder, because food was so close and so far away at the same time.
Leo tightened his jaw, the way he did when he was trying not to cry, and he took a step forward into the lot. He had to do something. Standing still would not fill a pantry. Standing still would not keep the lights on. Standing still would not make his mother well. So he would move. He would search. He would ask, if he had to, in the plainest words he could find. And if the day gave him nothing else, it would at least know that he had tried.
For two hours Leo searched the diner's parking lot for money that was not there. He did it the way he had done it on other days, methodically, because method was the only thing that kept a hopeless job from feeling hopeless. He started at the far edge of the lot, where the gravel met the weeds, and he worked his way inward in slow rows, the way a farmer might work a field. He kicked at the loose stones with the toe of his sneaker, gently, so as not to tear the sole any further. He crouched and peered into the cracks between the broken asphalt. He looked under the bumpers of parked cars, careful not to touch them, careful not to look as if he were stealing. He was not stealing. He was looking for what other people had lost.
He found nothing. Not a quarter. Not a dime. Not a nickel dull with dirt. He found bottle caps, and a twist of wire, and a plastic straw flattened by tyres, and a playing card with its corners curled by the sun. He found a gum wrapper that glittered for half a second before he realised what it was, and his heart did a foolish little jump that embarrassed him even though no one was watching. He put the wrapper back down. He did not pick up trash to keep. He picked it up only if it might be a coin, and when it was not a coin, he let it fall again.
The heat pressed on him as he worked. Sweat ran down the back of his neck and soaked the collar of his oversized T-shirt until the fabric clung to his shoulders. His throat grew dry. He had not brought water, because the trailer's tap ran warm and he had not wanted to waste a cup, and now he regretted it. He licked his lips and kept searching. The diner's awning gave a patch of shade near the door, but Leo did not stand in it for long. The awning belonged to customers, and he did not want Marty to come out and find him loitering where paying people walked. So he stayed in the open lot, in the sun, squinting against the glare off the cars, his shadow a small dark shape that followed him from row to row.
He thought about the walk home as he searched, and the thought made his steps slower. The walk home was a mile of hot road with no shade except for the thin shadows of telephone poles. At the end of it was the trailer, and the trailer was quiet except for his mother's coughing, and the pantry was empty, and there was nothing to say about it that would make it better. He had made that walk empty-handed before, on other days, and he knew exactly how it felt: the way the road seemed to stretch longer with every step, the way his feet seemed heavier, the way the door of the trailer seemed to ask him, without words, whether he had found anything, and the way he had to shake his head and watch his mother try to smile as if a smile could be food.