ask, and he looked at a list of employee meals rung under his own name, every week, going back five months, and at the payroll deductions beside them, and then he opened the desk drawer and looked at a yellow legal pad on which, in his own blocky handwriting, there was a second list, much shorter, with only one name on it and a column of numbers that started the first week of November.
He sat with that for a while. Then he put the tablet face-down on the desk again and laid his hands flat on top of it.
The first week, Moira treated it like weather.
She slept late on Tuesday for the first time in a year, and woke at ten with her heart pounding because she thought she had missed a shift, and then lay there in the gray light of her one-bedroom over the vacuum repair shop on Sixteenth Street, listening to the plows go by, until she remembered. She got up and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and filed for unemployment on the state website, which took an hour and forty minutes and asked her the reason for her separation in a drop-down menu that did not have an option for fed a kid a pot pie. She chose discharged and typed a short explanation in the box. Then she updated her resume, which had not been updated since 2021, and applied to nine jobs: an Applebee's, a Culver's, two hotel breakfast bars, a Denny's out by the interstate, the hospital cafeteria at Ascension, a brunch place downtown on Main Street with exposed brick and a chalkboard menu, a catering company, and a Kwik Trip, because her cousin said Kwik Trip paid better than anybody thought.
She told herself it would take two weeks. She had eleven years of experience and a clean record, and Racine was a restaurant town in the way that all lake towns were restaurant towns, because people who lived next to that much cold water needed somewhere warm to sit.
The Culver's called her back the first Thursday and the manager, a kid of maybe twenty-six with a lanyard and an earnest goatee, interviewed her at a corner booth and said she was exactly what they needed and he'd just have to do a quick reference check. He called her the next morning and said, in a voice that had gone careful and polite, that they had decided to go another direction.
The brunch place downtown said the same thing, almost word for word, a week later.