that she was not going to act as if she had. So she picked up the pen and, in the box marked Employee Statement, she wrote: I gave food to people who were hungry. I logged it as waste so it would not be charged to them. I did this more than once. I would do it again. Then she signed it and dated it and pushed it back across the desk.
Rena read it. Something passed over her face that might have been regret, and then she put it in the folder.
"Okay," she said. "Thank you for being honest. Abe will get your last check together. It'll be on your card Friday with your tips."
That was all. Rena closed the laptop. Moira untied her apron and folded it into a square, the way she always did at the end of a shift, and set it on the filing cabinet. Abe opened the office door for her, and as she passed him he said, very low, so that Rena might not hear it, "I asked for something else. I want you to know that. I asked, and I didn't get it."
She stopped in the doorway and looked at him. He looked older than he had on Tuesday. He looked like a man who had been carrying the tablet face-down for a very long time.
"You could have told me," she said. "If it was that big a deal. You saw the screen. You've been seeing it for months. You could have just told me to stop."
His mouth opened. For a second she thought he was going to say something real. Then Rena's chair creaked behind him, and his face closed again like a register drawer.
"Take care of yourself, Moira," he said.
She walked down the line. Wendy was at the grill and did not turn around, but she reached out as Moira passed and squeezed her elbow, once, hard, with a hand that smelled of onions. At the dish pit Fritzner was stacking clean plates on the speed rack, his reading glasses on a cord around his neck and his rubber apron dark with water. He looked up at her. He had a long, solemn face, and he had worked in that pit for six years, and in six years Moira had heard him say perhaps two hundred words, most of them about the Steelers, whom he followed for reasons he had never explained, and about his granddaughter in Miami, who was going to be a pharmacist. He looked at her bare waist where the apron had been, and she saw him understand.