didn't ask for it to cost you your job. Nobody asked me whether I wanted to be the reason. I don't want to be the reason. So I'm paying for it. Then it's not a pot pie somebody stole for me. It's a pot pie I bought, a little late."
"It doesn't work like that. They don't care about the money."
"I know they don't care. I care."
Moira looked away, at the windows. Out on the lake a gull was standing on the ice with its feathers puffed out, facing into the wind, not going anywhere.
"They wrote down theft," she said. "In my file. That's what they tell people when they call. Not eligible for rehire, termination for cause, theft. I've had three places tell me they'd love to have me and then call back the next day and say they're going in another direction. And unemployment denied me. Misconduct. Because I signed a piece of paper that said I did it and I'd do it again." She laughed, a short, unhappy sound. "I was proud of that. When I wrote it. I thought, I'm not going to pretend I'm sorry for feeding somebody."
Ayanna was quiet for a moment. "Are you sorry?"
"No," Moira said. And then, because Ayanna was still looking at her with that level, weighing look: "I don't know. I'm sorry I'm going to be late on rent. I'm sorry I signed it. I'm not sorry I fed you."
"Okay." Ayanna nodded slowly. "The manager told me it wasn't just my table."
Moira's face went warm. "He said that?"
"He said it twice. Like he wanted me to know something he wasn't allowed to say." Ayanna tilted her head. "How many tables, Moira?"
"I don't know. Some."
"Some like five?"
"Some like..." Moira stopped. She thought of the waste screen, the yellow highlighted lines Rena had not read out loud. Wrong temp, wrong temp, customer dissatisfied. A man in the bus shelter. Two boys from the motel. Mr. Varghese's pie. The teenagers counting change. The woman from the nursing home on Wednesdays. The guy with the guitar case. It had never felt like a number. It had felt like a series of single moments, each one separate, each one small, each one the obvious thing to do. "A lot," she said. "Since September. A couple times a week, maybe. Sometimes more. It wasn't a big deal. It was soup. It was fries. It was stuff that half the time really would have been thrown away at close."
"Half the time."
"Ayanna, you don't..." Moira heard her own voice getting sharp and pulled it back. "You don't know what it's like in there. Every night I watched people count out change. Every night. And there's a whole walk-in full of food and a corporate office in Milwaukee that's never going to miss a bowl of chili. My dad used to say nobody goes hungry at my table. That's how I was raised."