"It wasn't your table," Ayanna said.
She said it without heat, simply, the way you would point out to someone that their shoe was untied, and Moira felt it go into her like a splinter, small and deep.
Nyla had come back from the return slot. She was standing at the end of the table holding the edge of it with both hands, looking from one of them to the other.
"Mama," she said. "Did Miss Moira get in trouble because of me?"
Moira opened her mouth to say no, honey, of course not, and Ayanna put one hand flat on the table, not hard, and Moira closed her mouth again.
"Come here," Ayanna said, and Nyla came, and Ayanna turned her around by the shoulders so they were face to face. "Listen to me. Miss Moira got in trouble because there was a rule at her job, and she made a choice about the rule, and her boss made a choice about her. Those are grown-up choices. None of them were yours. You were hungry, and you ate your dinner, and you said thank you. Being hungry is never something you did wrong. You hear me?"
Nyla nodded. She looked at Moira. "Are you going to get a new job?"
"I'm trying," Moira said.
"You were a good waitress," Nyla said, with the absolute authority of a child delivering a verdict. "You brought extra crackers." Then she went off to the picture-book bins, where a boy her age was building something out of board books, and after a minute the two of them were arguing about it with tremendous energy.
Ayanna watched her go. Then she looked back at Moira, and her face had softened, though not very much.
"I'm not trying to be hard on you," she said. "I want you to know that. What you did for us, I'm grateful for. I'll be grateful for it when she's forty. But I've been on the other side of a lot of people's kindness, Moira. My grandmother raised me on a cook's wages and a church pantry and a book in the kitchen drawer where she wrote down every single thing anybody ever did for us. And what I learned from that book is that every gift comes out of somebody's pocket. Every one. Sometimes it's the person giving it. Sometimes it's not, and they don't know it, or they don't want to know." She tapped the envelope. "I know whose pocket this came out of. That's why I'm paying it."
"So what are you saying? That I deserved it?"