I got up early and headed back to that store before the doors opened, and I let myself in with my key and went straight to the loading dock, where the camera looks down over the bay.
Because that chain manager, so eager to swap the veterans for part-timers, never once thought to check the seasonal kid, or to look at the one camera that watches every pallet that comes and goes.
I pulled the footage from the day the copper fittings went missing, and there was the seasonal kid loading that whole pallet into the bed of his own truck at the end of his shift, plain as morning, the boy the manager never so much as questioned.
I copied it, and set it aside, and I waited for the cookout Friday, because the founding family were driving in, and they were the ones who needed to see it.
The old family started that store fifty years ago, before they sold to the chain, and they still came back for the anniversaries, and they still cared. When the chain manager rose to say his few cold words about my twenty-nine years, I asked the family if they would look at something first.
They looked. The dock. The kid. The pallet in his truck.
The founding family were not smiling anymore, and not at me. They got the chain office on the phone before the burgers were off the grill, and the manager who threatened me with the sheriff was gone by Monday, and the seasonal kid with him.
The chain, embarrassed to its bones, asked me back, and threw in the raise I had been owed for years. I took it, on my terms. My hands can still find any bolt in that place blindfolded, and now I am teaching the part-timers where every one of them lives.
The copper the kid took was recovered from his garage. The name he tried to pin it on came out clean.
I have thought a good deal, these last days, about how easy it would have been to just sign the paper and go. That is what they count on, men like that. That an old worker will be too tired, or too proud, or too afraid to fight, and will slink off quiet 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 about to let a stranger take mine over money I never touched.
Twenty-nine years I helped every rancher in the county and floated a young couple their first porch. It turned out the county, and an old family, and a camera over the dock, helped me right back.