Wes stopped leaning on the counter. He looked at the phone in my hand, then at the spreadsheet on the screen, then at the red dot in the corner.
He did not say it again. He did not have to. He had already said it twice, and the phone had caught both.
The spreadsheet had every shift since last December. Clock out time from the punch system. Then the task he gave me after, and when I actually walked out the door. Mopping, forty minutes. Restock the walk in, an hour and ten. Count the safe, twenty five. Eleven months of it. It added up to four hundred and sixty two hours I never got paid for.
One of the girls wiping tables, Destiny, put her rag down. She said, can you make me one of those?
Two years of being the one who watches the clock, and it turned out the clock was the only thing in that building that ever told the truth.
I did the freezer count that night. On the clock. I clocked back in right in front of him and he did not say a word.
The next morning I filed a wage claim online with the state labor department. It took twenty minutes. I attached the spreadsheet and the recording. Destiny filed one too. So did Marcus from the grill, and a kid named Tony who had only worked there four months and already had sixty unpaid hours.
A woman from the labor department called me the next week. She said four claims from the same store in the same week gets attention. She said the company would have to pay back wages for every unpaid hour, plus penalties, for every employee they did it to, not just the ones who filed.
The district manager, a man named Paul, showed up at the store two days later. He sat in the back office with Wes for an hour. When he came out, Wes was carrying a cardboard box.
Paul called a meeting with the whole crew that afternoon. He said what happened was against every policy the company had. He said he was sorry nobody noticed sooner. He said from now on, every closing shift would have two people, and nobody would work one minute off the clock. Then he looked at me and asked if I would be interested in the shift lead position.
I said yes.
The back pay came in two checks, about two months apart. Mine came to a little over five thousand dollars. I paid my rent. I paid the next three months of rent. I bought my little brother new shoes for school.
Destiny got about half that. She cried in the parking lot. She said it was the first time she ever had more than one paycheck in the bank at once.
Tony got his too. He used it for his first semester at the community college.
I run closing now. Every night at nine, I look at the clock and tell everybody the same thing. If you are still here, you are still getting paid.
Nobody has to learn loyalty the hard way anymore.