"Ou ale?" he said, which she knew meant you're going, because he said it every night when she clocked out. "You're going?"
"I'm going, Fritz," she said. "For good, I guess."
He nodded slowly. There was something in his face she could not read, a stillness, as if he were waiting for something more. Then he said, "Okay. Bonswa, Moira," and went back to his plates.
She went out through the back door into the alley, where the dumpsters were rimmed with old gray ice, and sat in her car with the engine running and the heater roaring and did not cry, because she was thirty-six years old and had been fired before, once, from a Perkins in Kenosha at nineteen for calling in sick to go to a concert, and she had not cried then either. She sat there until the windshield cleared. Then she drove home.
Abe Pellegrino stayed in the office after Rena left. He sat in the chair, which was still warm, and looked at the nine gray squares. In square four, Dacia was seating a two-top in what had been Moira's section. In square seven, the kitchen, Fritzner was carrying a bus tub to the pit. Abe watched him for a long time.
Abe had a daughter at UW-Parkside who wanted to be a physical therapist and who needed, by August, nine thousand dollars that the federal government was not going to give her. He had a wife who worked in billing at Ascension and who had stopped asking him how his day was, not out of coldness but out of mercy. He had a performance plan, which Rena had put him on in December, which said in four bullet points that if the Washington Avenue location did not bring its prime cost within the target band by the end of the first quarter, Lakeshore would "evaluate leadership options." He had nineteen years of his own name over a door on Douglas Avenue, and then a landlord's letter, and then a Small Business Administration loan he was still paying off at a hundred and forty dollars a month for a restaurant that no longer existed. He had once fed a whole union local for free for three weeks during a strike at the Case plant, out of his own walk-in, because the men were his customers and their kids went to school with his kid. He had been, for most of his life, the kind of man who did that.
He picked up the tablet and turned it face-up and looked at the number in the corner, the one that had been red since September. Then he opened a different screen, one that Rena had not asked to see, because she had not known to