Moira did not look at the pages. She did not need to. She knew what was on them. A short stack for the man who slept in the bus shelter on Durand in November. A bowl of soup and a grilled cheese, twice a week, for the two boys from the motel whose mother worked doubles at the Amazon warehouse in Kenosha. A slice of pie, every Friday, for Mr. Varghese, because his wife had liked the pie and she was dead now and he would not order it for himself. Fries for teenagers who had counted out change. Wrong temp, wrong temp, customer dissatisfied, dropped, wrong temp.
"So what happens," she said.
Rena glanced at Abe. Abe took his hands out of his pockets.
"We have to let you go, Moira," he said. "I'm sorry."
She had known it was coming since he said got a minute, and still it hit her low in the stomach, like missing a step in the dark.
"For a pot pie," she said.
"For the records," Rena said gently. "It's the records. If you had come to Abe and asked to comp a meal, there's a process. Managers have a comp budget. If you had paid for it yourself, nobody would ever have known or cared. What we can't have is people logging product as waste when it's going out the door, because once we allow that, the numbers don't mean anything, and if the numbers don't mean anything, I can't tell the difference between a server feeding a hungry kid and a server feeding her boyfriend's whole softball team every Saturday. Which, I'll tell you, I've seen. In this district. This year."
"I don't have a boyfriend," Moira said, stupidly.
"I know. I'm not saying that's you." Rena slid a single sheet of paper out of the folder and set it on the corner of the desk, with a pen on top of it. "This is a statement form. It just says what happened, in your words. You don't have to sign it. But if you want to put your side down, this is where it goes, and it goes in your file with everything else."
Later, Moira would go over this moment many times, and every time she would think: you should have taken it home. You should have read it twice. You should have asked what goes in your file meant and who could see it. But in the room, with the nine gray squares glowing on the wall and Abe not looking at her and the smell of the fryer oil coming under the door, the only thing she could think was that she had not done anything she was ashamed of, and