The next morning I got up and put on my good shirt, because the company had a banquet for my twenty-eight years on the books for that Friday, the owners flying in from out of state, and I had decided I would attend after all.
I walked in during the speeches, in my good shirt, and I handed the owners a flash drive.
For twenty-eight years I had watched every door and window in that building on camera, which meant I also had, plain as day, the footage of who really took the seventy-five dollars.
It was the operations manager himself. The man who had grabbed the clipboard out of my hands and told me to sign the resignation or go out in cuffs. He had opened that petty cash box with his own key, on a night he thought no one was watching, and taken the seventy-five dollars, so that in the morning he would have his excuse to fire the old-timers and bring in the cheap security contract he had been angling for.
He forgot one thing. The old-timer he framed was the one man who knew every camera in that building, because keeping them running had been his job for twenty-eight years.
I did not argue with him that night on the floor. Arguing is for people without proof. I set down my keys and my flashlight, told him I understood, and walked out into the dark I had guarded for nearly thirty years. Then I went home and pulled the footage, calm as could be, and I waited for Friday.
The owners watched it right there at the banquet, on a laptop, while the manager went the color of paste. They fired him on the spot, in front of the whole room that had watched him humiliate me. They gave me my job back, with back pay, and an apology, and the owner shook my hand and said the company was ashamed.
I did not take the job back. Twenty-eight years was enough, and I had already made my peace with the porch and the fishing. But I took the apology, and I took the back pay, and I took the pension I had nearly been cheated out of over seventy-five dollars.
Most of all I took the look on that young managers face when he learned that the tired old man he thought he could throw away had been watching the whole time.
That was my job, after all. I was the one watching.