The second Friday a letter came from the Department of Workforce Development. Moira opened it standing at the mailboxes in the stairwell, in her coat, with the door to the vacuum shop open behind her and the smell of hot motors coming through. The letter said that her claim for unemployment insurance had been denied, because the information provided by her former employer indicated that she had been discharged for misconduct connected with her employment, specifically, the theft of employer property, and that this determination was supported by a signed statement in which the claimant admitted the conduct. It said she had fourteen days to appeal.
She read the word theft four times. Then she went upstairs and sat on the edge of her bed with the letter in her lap.
The next time a manager, at the Denny's, said he'd have to check her references, she asked him, before he could hang up, what Hearthstone had told him. He was a tired man in his fifties with a Packers lanyard and he hesitated a long time. Then he said, "Look. They're not supposed to say much. They said not eligible for rehire. I asked why, and the lady said termination for cause, theft. That's all she said. I'm sorry. I got an owner who looks at that stuff."
"It was a pot pie," Moira said.
"I'm sure it was," the man said, the same way Rena Haig had said it, and she understood that this was a sentence people said when they believed you and it did not matter.
That night she got out the shoebox.
The shoebox lived on the top shelf of her closet and it held what was left of her father: his union card from UAW Local 180, his Case IH service pin for twenty-five years, a Polaroid of him behind the grill at the Local 180 picnic in Pritchard Park in 1994 wearing an apron that said KISS THE COOK with the KISS crossed out in marker and FEED written above it, and a stack of sympathy cards from his funeral in 2019, which she had kept because almost every one of them said the same thing in a different hand. Your dad fed my kids during the strike. Zbig never let anybody leave hungry. When my husband was laid off your father brought us groceries every Saturday for two months and never said a word about it. He used to say nobody goes hungry at my table and he meant it.
Her father had said it to her so many times growing up that it had stopped being a sentence and become a kind of floor she walked on. Nobody goes hungry at my table. He had said it in the kitchen of the house on