The employee number was 0417. Harriet read it out, and the cashier said she did not know whose it was, and Jordan was looking at a young woman by the cake table named Brittany, who did the scheduling and the new-hire paperwork and had been dating Jordan since spring.
But it was not Brittanys number.
It was mine.
I knew it the second she said it. You do not forget a number you punched into a time clock for thirty-one years. 0417. Dairy first, then dry grocery. When I retired in 2019 nobody ever closed it out, because nobody at Lakeside ever closed anything out, and Jordan had found that number sitting in the system like a key under a doormat.
Every void that was not under his own login was under mine. Same hours, same lanes, same amounts, all after the customer paid. And every one of them had been entered from the manager terminal in the back office, which I had not set foot in since my retirement party.
That is why he banned me. Not because of the peanuts. Because a retired stock man who came in every single morning was the perfect name to have on the voids if anybody ever looked. We have had a lot of shrink since you started coming in every day. He had said it to the whole store so there would be witnesses.
Harriet asked Brittany to come over to the table. She asked her one question, which was who had reactivated employee 0417 in March, and Brittany started to cry and said Jordan told her it was for a returning seasonal hire.
Then Harriet asked the cashier to pull the time clock. I had not clocked in once. I could not have. My badge had been cut in half at my retirement party and I had the pieces in a drawer at home.
Jordans uncle stood up off the folding chair. He is the owner. He has owned that store since before I started. He looked at his nephew for a long moment and then he said, in front of the whole customer appreciation day, that Jordan should get his things from the office and leave the keys on the desk.
He had put my name on his thievery because he figured an old man in a green vest was the one person nobody would ever believe.
Harriet did not let it end there. She walked me over to the service desk, in front of everybody, and had the cashier print a fresh copy of my receipt from the register journal. Four items, $23.17, paid in full, 9:42 in the morning. She signed the bottom of it and wrote, Ban lifted, with apology, and the date.
Then she asked me, quietly, whether I wanted to press charges for what he had done with my number. I thought about Lois crying in the car. I said yes.
The police came the following week. The register journals do not glitch and they do not lie, and the terminal logs showed every void traced to the back office at times when the only person in the building with a key to that office was Jordan. He was charged with theft and with identity fraud for using my number. He pleaded to both.
The forty-one voids on his login and the sixty-three on mine added up to just under five hundred dollars. It was never about the money. It was about having somebody to blame.
Brittany kept her job, barely. The uncle hired a manager from outside the family, a woman who had run a register for twenty years before anybody let her run a store.
The peanuts, by the way, were still on the shelf in the back office in a box marked evidence. Harriet brought them out and set them on the cake table next to the Ziploc. I took them home. Lois made a face and then she laughed, and that was the first time she had laughed since March.
I still shop there every morning. Coffee, a newspaper, whatever is on the list. The new manager put a little brass plate on the end of lane three. It says Herb, 1988 to 2019, and under that it says, He paid for the peanuts.