He said, “Corrie. Come in now.”
Somebody had found something when they moved the bench to clean behind it after close. Wedged right down in the gap between the seat back and the panel.
Not a wallet. Not a phone.
And when I came through that door at half past eight, Vaughn Teller was standing in the middle of an empty restaurant with all the chairs still up on the tables, and he looked like a completely different man from the one who had taken my tip book.
He said, quietly, “I think you need to see this.”
PART 2 — THIRTY COVERS
I want to slow down on the Thursday night, because that is the part I actually think about.
It was not the money. I have been short before and I will be again.
It was that there were about thirty people in that room and three other servers and a bartender, and he did it standing up, at the station, in the open.
The four-top nearest us stopped talking. A woman with her back to me turned her head.
Jonah, who has worked there six years, was eleven feet away carrying a tray, and he slowed down and then he kept walking.
Nobody said one word.
And I did not say anything either, which is the part I have had to sit with.
I said, “Okay,” and went and ran food for table six.
I am not telling anybody they should have started something in a dining room. I would not have wanted that. I would have died.
But I have thought about how completely normal it looked. A manager took a hundred and sixty dollars out of a twenty-one-year-old’s apron in front of thirty paying customers, and the room absorbed it in about two seconds, and everybody went back to their starters.
