straight to the pit and asked Fritz if he could buy him a cup of coffee across the street at the Kwik Trip. They were gone forty minutes. When they came back Fritz went to his station and tied on his rubber apron and started running racks, and Abe went into the office and shut the door, and nobody knew what had been said, and Fritz never told. Wendy said only that Fritz's name was back on the schedule for Thursday closing the next week, and that she had seen Abe hand him an envelope at the time clock, and Fritz had looked at it a long time before he put it in his pocket.
Two days after that, Abe drove to the Lakeshore Hospitality Partners office in a strip mall in Sturtevant and sat across a desk from Rena Haig and told her the rest: that he had known what Moira was doing since October, that he had covered it with manager meals out of his own paycheck, that he had cut the dishwasher's hours to make up the difference rather than make a hard phone call to a server he liked. Rena listened to all of it without interrupting. Then she took off her reading glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose for a while.
"You understand what you've just told me," she said.
"Yes."
"You understand I could terminate you for this."
"Yes."
She did not terminate him. She wrote him up, a final written warning, the last step on a ladder he was already near the top of, and she told him that if the Washington Avenue prime cost was not inside the band by June she would not be able to protect him and would not try. And then, because a manager's knowledge and acquiescence changed the record, or because she had a niece somewhere who thought she was the world's okayest aunt, or because she was tired of watching things go the wrong way in the snow, she pulled Moira Szafran's file and amended the separation code from theft to policy violation, and she signed a short letter to the Department of Workforce Development saying so. Abe never told Moira that Rena had been the one to suggest the letter. He did not think it was his to tell.
The appeal hearing was set for April. Moira did not know how it would go. She did not let herself count on it.
She found work in the meantime at a place called the Ironwood, a twenty-four-hour diner by the transit center on State Street, with a counter and ten stools and six booths and a coffee urn older than Moira. It was owned by a woman named