Gerri Plaskett who was seventy-one and had run it for thirty-eight years and wore her glasses on a beaded chain and did the books herself at the back booth every afternoon at two. Moira had walked in with her resume and the letter from the state that said theft, and she had put both of them on the table in front of Gerri and told her everything before Gerri could ask a single question. The waste screen, the pot pie, the statement, the Thursday shift, Fritz, the forty dollars a week. She told it badly and all the way through.
Gerri read the letter twice. Then she took off her glasses and let them drop on their chain and looked at Moira for a long time.
"You want to know what I think," she said.
"Yes."
"I think you're a good waitress who did a dumb thing for a good reason and got caught, and then did a harder thing for a better reason, which was go stand on that man's sidewalk." She reached under the counter and came up with a fat spiral notebook with a green cover, the kind sold at Walgreens for school, its pages soft and swollen from years of coffee steam. She dropped it on the table between them. "Here's my rule. Anybody who works for me wants to feed somebody who can't pay, they write it in this book. Date, what it was, what it cost, their name. And then they come to me and we decide together whose pocket it comes out of. Sometimes it's mine. Sometimes it's theirs. Sometimes we split it. Sometimes it's the jar." She pointed at a gallon pickle jar by the register, with a hand-lettered sign taped to it that said PAY IT AHEAD and a mix of bills and coins inside. "The jar is customers who want to help. They know exactly what it's for. Nobody gets surprised. Nobody gets robbed, not even nice. That's the rule. Can you live with that?"
Moira looked at the green notebook. She opened it. The pages were columns in a dozen different handwritings going back years, and almost every line had a single neat stroke through it, not erased, so you could still read it.
"Yes," she said. "I can live with that."
Ayanna paid her bill on the first warm day of April, at the bus shelter on Washington Avenue, at a quarter past nine at night. She had asked Moira when Fritz's Thursday shift let out, and Moira had told her, and Ayanna had stood there