Abe looked at the nurses' table, and at the retirees, and at the ceiling, as though one of those places might have an answer he could give her. "I can't really discuss personnel," he said. "I'm sorry."
"I didn't ask you to discuss personnel. I asked if she was fired because she fed my daughter."
"She was terminated for violating company policy on waste and comps," Abe said. He said it like a man reading off a card he had been handed. Then, more quietly, not reading: "It wasn't just your table, ma'am. I want you to know that. It wasn't just your table."
She took the envelope out of her pocket. "I came to pay our bill."
Abe looked at the envelope and for a moment he looked genuinely stricken. "I can't take that," he said. "There's no ticket open. It's been closed out. I don't have anywhere to put it."
"Then open one."
"I can't open a ticket for a meal from three weeks ago, the system won't..." He stopped. He rubbed his face with the towel. "Ma'am, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be difficult with you. I just can't."
Ayanna put the envelope back in her pocket. She felt the old heat come up into her face, the one that had come up at table nine, the one Mama Phee used to call her temper and Ayanna privately called her spine.
"Then give me her number," she said. "Because I owe somebody eighteen dollars and ninety-seven cents and a tip, and if I can't pay it here I am going to pay it to her."
"I can't give out employee information."
"She's not your employee."
Abe opened his mouth and closed it. Behind him, Dacia had come back out of the kitchen and was standing by the coffee station, pretending to wipe it.
"I'm sorry," Abe said again, and went back through the swinging door.
Ayanna stood for a moment at the host stand. Then she turned and walked out into the cold, and she was halfway across the lot toward the bus shelter when she heard the door bang open behind her and quick footsteps on the salted pavement, and Dacia caught up with her, in her apron, no coat, her arms wrapped around herself.
"Here," Dacia said, and pushed a folded order slip into her hand. "I texted her first. She said it's okay. She said you'd probably try to pay her and to tell you not to bother." Dacia's teeth were chattering. "I told her you'd probably bother anyway."
They met on Saturday afternoon in the children's room of the public library on Main Street, because Ayanna said Nyla had books due and because, she said on the phone, she did not want to sit in another restaurant with Moira right now and have one of them wondering who was paying.