Ayanna looked down at the column of numbers. Ninety-nine thirteen, ninety-nine thirteen, ninety-nine thirteen, fifteen times.
"Moira doesn't know," she said.
"Moira doesn't know. Fritz doesn't know. Rena doesn't know about the manager meals, and she doesn't know that I knew what Moira was doing since October, and if she did, I'd be gone too, and I'm already on a plan." He leaned back against the booth. "So that's your table, Ms. Cutler. Your pot pie was eighteen bucks. Fritz's Thursdays were fifteen hundred. He's the one who paid for her kindness, and mine. He just never got asked."
Outside a plow went by on Washington Avenue with its blade down and its amber light turning, throwing slow orange across the snowbanks and the glass and Abe's face.
"Why are you telling me this?" Ayanna said. "You could have said personnel again."
"Because you came back to pay," he said. "Twice. In nineteen years at Pellegrino's and four here, do you know how many people have come back to pay for a comp? You can count them on a hand with fingers missing." He looked at her. "And because I've been carrying that sheet in my jacket for two months, and you're the first person who asked."
Ayanna was quiet for a long time. She thought of the book in Mama Phee's kitchen drawer, the old debts with their single neat lines through them, and of what her grandmother had said: the book remembers so nobody has to carry it. Nobody had written this one down. Or rather, one person had, on a yellow pad in a jacket pocket, and then had carried it alone, which was the opposite of what a ledger was for.
"You're going to tell him," she said. It was not quite a question.
"I've been going to tell him since November."
"Then what's stopping you?"
Abe looked out the window at the plow's taillights going away. "If I tell him, I have to tell him I chose," he said. "I could've cut my own hours. I'm salaried, but I could've cut a manager shift, worked the floor more, I don't know. I could've told Moira to knock it off in October and none of this happens. I chose the guy who wouldn't complain. That's what I'd have to say to his face."
"That sounds like the truth."
"It is the truth." He laughed, not happily. "That's the problem with it."
Ayanna took the envelope out of her pocket. She looked at it, at 24.97 in her own neat capitals, and then she put it back.