"I came to pay my bill," she said. "But I don't think I know yet who I owe." She slid out of the booth and stood and zipped her parka. "Thank you for the coffee, Mr. Pellegrino. It was terrible."
"Told you," Abe said. He did not get up. He was looking at the legal pad. As she reached the door he said, without turning around, "Are you going to tell Moira?"
Ayanna stopped with her hand on the push bar.
"Somebody has to," she said. "And she asked me to come. So I guess it's me."
Ayanna told her on Thursday, on the landing outside Moira's apartment, because Moira had offered to come to her and Ayanna had said no, this was the kind of thing you said at someone's door and then left. The vacuum shop downstairs was running a motor test and the whole stairwell hummed with it. Ayanna told it plainly, the comp budget and the manager meals and the prime cost and the Thursday shift, and she did not soften it and she did not sharpen it. When she got to the number, fourteen hundred and eighty-six dollars and ninety-five cents, Moira put one hand on the door frame.
"That's not right," Moira said. "That's not... they cut hours every winter. Every place does. That's not me."
"Maybe," Ayanna said. "He thinks it was. He's the one who did the cutting."
"He could have told me."
"He said that too."
Moira stood in her doorway with her hand on the frame and her eyes going somewhere far off, and Ayanna watched her remember something. It came over her face slowly, like a stain coming up through paint.
"Fritz asked me," Moira said. "Before Christmas. He asked me if my cousin's company was hiring for Thursday nights. Anything, he said. Cleaning offices, anything. I said I'd ask. I never asked." She swallowed. "I gave him a piece of pie. I put it on the waste screen. Wrong temp."
Ayanna said nothing. There was nothing that needed saying.
"I have to go see him," Moira said.
"Yes," said Ayanna, and went down the humming stairs, and left her there.
Fritzner Desrosiers lived in a narrow green house on Thirteenth Street with a chain-link fence and a statue of the Virgin in the front yard wearing a little cap of snow. On Saturday morning he was out on the walk with a shovel, clearing it in short, careful strokes, favoring his right shoulder, and when Moira's car pulled up at the curb he stopped and leaned on the shovel and watched her get out. He did not look surprised either. Moira was beginning to think she was the only person in Racine who had been surprised by any of this.