Cross is covering three nights. But the front desk put a two-hundred-dollar hold on my card for incidentals, and the hold won't drop until we check out, and I got paid Friday, and two hundred is about what I had after the rent I'm apparently paying for an apartment I can't walk into." She said all this evenly, like reading a weather report. "That's the situation. I'm not poor. I'm broke this week. There's a difference."
"There is," Moira said.
Ayanna took a five and a one and four quarters out of a coin purse in the Walgreens bag and put them in the folder. "That's six. I'm short forty-nine cents. I'll bring it."
"Please don't worry about it."
"I'm going to bring it," Ayanna said. "I wrote it down."
She helped Nyla back into the too-small snowsuit and zipped her own parka to the chin, and at the door she turned and lifted one hand to Moira, a small salute, almost formal, and then the bell rang and the cold came in and they were gone, two dark shapes crossing the white lot toward the frontage road, the little one stepping exactly in the big one's footprints.
Moira went back to the terminal and rang the grilled cheese as paid in cash, and she put Ayanna's six dollars in the drawer and forty-nine cents out of her own apron after them, so that the drawer would come out even. It did not occur to her to think of the pot pie and the chili, sitting on the waste screen under wrong temp with the night's other remakes, as anything that needed coming out even. Abe came out of the back office at nine-fifteen with his coat on and his tablet under his arm and stood beside her at the server station for a minute, looking at the screen over her shoulder, and she thought he was going to say something. His jaw moved like he was getting ready to.
"Go home, Moira," he said instead. "Roads are bad. Dacia can close."
They fired her on Monday.
It happened in the back office, which was not really an office but a former dry-storage room with a desk and a filing cabinet and a safe bolted to the floor, and a monitor on the wall that showed the restaurant in nine gray squares, one for each camera. Moira had come in for her four o'clock shift and clocked in and tied her apron, and Abe had been standing at the end of the line waiting for her with his hands in his pockets, and he had said, "Got a minute before you go out?" in a voice so carefully ordinary that she knew immediately.