He poured two mugs and brought them to a booth by the window, the round one, the big one for families, and sat down across from her with a grunt. Up close he looked worse than he had the week before. There were deep pouches under his eyes and a nick on his jaw where he had shaved badly.
"She tell you she's having trouble finding work?" he said, before Ayanna could start.
"She told me what your company tells people when they call."
He nodded. He turned his mug a quarter turn on the table, then another quarter turn.
"I asked Rena to code it as a policy violation," he said. "You get rehire-eligible after a year, the unemployment people mostly leave you alone, nobody calling for a reference hears the word theft. Rena would have done it, I think. She's not a monster. But Moira wrote I would do it again on the statement, and LP has a rule. If they admit it and say they'll repeat it, it's theft. Rena's hands were tied, or she said they were, and I believed her." He drank some of the terrible coffee. "I should have told Moira not to sign anything. I didn't. I was standing right there."
"Why not?"
"Because I'd have had to say why, and then everything else would have come out, and I'd have had to say it in front of Rena." He set the mug down. "You want to know what table you're sitting at. Dacia told me you'd say that. She said Moira texted her."
"I do."
Abe looked at her for a long moment. Then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, which was lying on the bench beside him, and took out a folded sheet of yellow legal paper, and smoothed it flat on the table between them, and turned it around so she could read it.
At the top, in blocky capitals, it said FRITZ. Below that was a column of dates, one for every week from the first of November to the middle of February, and beside each date the number 6.5, and beside that the number 99.13, and at the bottom, circled twice, a total: 1,486.95.
"What is this?" Ayanna said.
"That's our dishwasher," Abe said. "Fritzner Desrosiers. He's been in that pit six years. He's sixty-one, he's got a bad shoulder, he sends money to a granddaughter in Miami who's in pharmacy school. Until November, he worked five nights a week. Thursday was his long night, the closing shift, six and a half hours. Fifteen twenty-five an hour. Ninety-nine dollars and thirteen cents."
He let that sit. Ayanna did not say anything.
"Here's how it works in a place like this," Abe said. "Every plate has a cost. Every hour of labor has a cost. You add those two up, you call it prime cost, and the people who own fourteen of these restaurants want prime cost