I drove back to that store before they unlocked, and I let myself in with my key, and I went straight to the stockroom, to the thing the new man does not know I still hold the key to.
Because that new owner, so eager to swap the veterans for part-timers, never knew that the old security recorder sits locked in the back of the stockroom, wired to a camera over the register, in a cabinet only I have the key to.
I pulled the recording from the evening the drawer came up short, the evening I had already gone home, and there was the kid he keeps on the closing shift, lifting the cash out of the drawer while he thought no one would ever look, the boy the owner never questioned.
I copied it, and I waited for the lunch Friday, because the district folks were coming, and they were the ones who ought to see it.
When the new owner stood up to say his few words about my twenty-eight years, I asked the district people if they would look at something first.
They looked. The register. The closing kid. The date, on a night my name was clocked out hours before.
The district people went very quiet. The owner had accused a man who was not even in the building, to cover for the boy he put on nights, and now his bosses had seen it.
He was gone within the week, and the closing kid with him. The district asked me back, with a raise, and I took it, on my terms. I can still find any bolt in that place blindfolded.
The cash the kid took, he paid back. The law the owner threatened me with never came for me.
I thought a long while, that first dark night, about just signing the paper and going quiet. That is what a man like that counts on, that an old worker is too tired or too proud or too afraid to fight, and will slink off and let the lie stand. I nearly did. I am glad I did not. A name is the one thing you carry your whole life, and I was not going to hand mine to a stranger over a thing I never did.
The young folks coming up watched the whole of it play out, and I hope they learned what I learned the hard way. Keep your own records. Trust your own hands. And when a person with a title tries to make you carry the blame for a thing you never did, do not put your name on their paper until the truth has had its say. The truth is slow sometimes. But it keeps, and it comes around.
Twenty-eight years I ran that register, and they tried to end me over a short drawer on a night I was home asleep. It turned out the one camera that mattered was locked in a stockroom behind a key only I still carried. Careful is careful. It saved me, in the end.