The kid who had come into the bar walked up out of the hot weeds and stood there looking at us for a minute. Then he got in the car. His grandmother had to pull up the front seat to let him in. She turned around and shut the door.

“I may just go to Texas,” the woman said. “I got a sister lives out there. I may just drop these kids off with her for a while and go on out to California. To Los Vegas.”

I started to tell her that Las Vegas was not in California, but it didn’t matter. She turned the beer up and took a long drink of it, and I could see the muscles and cords in her throat pumping and working. She killed it. She dropped the can at her feet, and it hit with a tiny tinny sound and rolled under the car. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, tugging hard at her lips, and then she wiped her eyes.

“Don’t nobody know what I been through,” she said. She was looking at the ground. “Havin to live on food stamps and feed four younguns.” She shook her head. “You cain’t do it,” she said. “You cain’t hardly blame nobody for wantin to run off from it. If they was any way I could run off myself I would.”

“That’s bad,” I said.

“That’s terrible,” I said.

She looked up and her eyes were hot.

“What do you care? All you goin to do is go right back in there and git drunk. You just like everybody else. You ain’t never had to go in a grocery store and buy stuff with food stamps and have everbody look at you. You ain’t never had to go hungry. Have you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Have you?”

“No.”

“All right, then,” she said. She jerked her head toward the building. “Go on back in there and drank ye goddamn beer. We made it this far without you.”

She turned her face to one side. I reached back for my wallet because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I couldn’t stand to look at them anymore.

I pulled out thirty dollars and gave it to her. I knew that their troubles were more than she’d outlined, that they had awful things wrong with their lives that thirty dollars would never cure. But I don’t know. You know how I felt? I felt like I feel when I see those commercials on TV, of all those people, women and kids, starving to death in Ethiopia and places, and I don’t send money. I know that Jesus wants you to help feed the poor.