Next morning I got up, put on my good blouse, and drove out to the mall for the years of service celebration, because the owners were flying in and because my name was on the little card at the head table.
I did not go to make trouble in front of company. I went because twenty-three years of showing up does not quit on a Wednesday.
What I did on the way was stop and see Ravi, who has run that phone accessory kiosk since 2009 and who is the man whose drawer it was.
A register keeps a journal. Every ring, every void, and every time that drawer comes open without a sale, which the machine calls a no-sale and stamps with the time and the clerk number of whoever opened it. It is not a special report. It prints off the same roll as everything else and Ravi reads it every morning with his tea.
The no-sale on that drawer was at 6:12 in the morning, under his weekend girl’s clerk number.
At 6:12 I was on the far end of the north concourse behind a floor scrubber the size of a golf cart, which is a machine that also keeps its own hours, because the leasing company bills by the run time and the thing logs every minute it moves.
Ravi printed the journal himself and brought it to that celebration in a plastic sleeve, and he wore a suit, and he is not a man who owns a suit.
They gave me my award anyway. Twenty-three years, a glass thing with my name etched on it, and the property owner read out the paragraph about the people who make this place shine before the doors ever open.
Then Ravi asked, in his very polite way, whether he might correct something for the record.
He read the no-sale line. Time, drawer, clerk number. Then he said that this woman had been cornered by the food court in front of her whole crew and told to sign a resignation or be taken out in handcuffs, and that the operations manager had never once walked forty feet to his kiosk to ask him for the tape.
The owners asked the operations manager, in front of the cake, why he had not asked.
He did not have an answer that anybody could use.
The weekend girl was nineteen and she had a mother in the hospital and she had every intention of putting it back. She told Ravi herself the following Monday. He kept her on, and made her count the drawer with him every shift for a year, and she is his assistant manager now.
They put me back with my years whole. I did another two and retired last February.
The contract cleaners never came in. The operations manager left in the spring.
My glass award is on the shelf by the door. Ravi’s printout is folded inside the box it came in, and he did not ask for it back.