The next morning, before I’d finished my coffee, the phone rang, and it was a woman named Charlene Boback out of the regional office in Pittsburgh, who I had never met and who started the conversation by asking me not to sign anything.
The terminal had run its month-end exception report the night before, the way it does automatically, and it had spit out something the manager had not gotten around to looking at.
Here’s how that counter works. Every clerk signs on to the ticket terminal with a number. Every sale, every void, every refund carries that number and a time stamp, and cash refunds throw a flag because cash refunds are how people steal from bus stations, and have been since before I was born.
Fourteen cash refunds in five weeks on tickets that had already been used. Every one of them run between 11:40 at night and one in the morning, after the windows close.
All fourteen under one sign-on. Not one of the young clerks. The assistant manager’s — a fellow who took to staying late in the spring, who I have watched let himself behind that counter with his own key while I ran the buffer down the main aisle, three, four nights a week.
I have known for months. I did not say it, because I am a sixty-two-year-old woman with a mop and he is a man with a title, and I have watched how that goes my whole life.
A thing like that stays quiet exactly as long as the one who saw it decides it should, and when the manager put a resignation letter in front of me by the benches with the whole night staff watching, I decided it shouldn’t anymore. I told Charlene all of it on the phone with my coffee going cold.
They pulled the door logs and the terminal report side by side. It took a day and a half.
He’d been at it since March. The number they finally landed on was over four thousand dollars.
They came down and did it in the terminal itself at shift change, standing between the benches where she’d said the other thing, with the drivers coming in and out. Charlene read the dates and the times. The manager apologized to me in front of every one of them and I let her get all the way through it.
They gave me my keys and eleven days of pay, and the drivers took up a collection I could not talk them out of.
What I kept is a card the Greyhound and Trailways men all signed and taped over the coffee maker in the drivers’ room.
She’s had coffee on for us at 4 a.m. for twenty-seven years and never once asked for a thing. Next person who wants to accuse her of something can come explain it to us first.
I’m back on nights. Terminal’s spotless by five, coffee’s on by four-thirty, and there is always a chair and a kind word for the ones traveling scared.