For seven months my manager called me after eleven at night to ask where the tape gun was, and when I told him my daughter was asleep he said, “Then you’re not doing anything, Caitlin.” One Friday I finally sent him a text. He saw it and went quiet, and fifty minutes later a deputy was on my porch asking about him.
I couldn’t lose that job.
It paid for our half of the duplex and Giulia’s after-school program, and Zachary knew to the dollar what I made because he was the one who signed my timecard.
I did invoices and the front counter at a furniture store in Sheboygan. Days only, eight to four-thirty.
The first call came in April, at 11:14 on a TUESDAY.
“Where do we keep the tape gun?” he said.
“Second drawer under the register,” I said. “Behind the deposit bags.”
“Okay. And the extra receipt rolls?”
That one took four minutes. Then he wanted to know if the fern by the front window was real.
It was plastic. He’d walked past it every day for three years.
He called the next night.
And the night after.
Always after eleven. Never about anything a grown man couldn’t find by opening a drawer.
Which key was the bathroom key. Whether the price gun took the small labels or the big ones.
And he asked slow. Long gaps between questions, like he was reading off a list I couldn’t see.
Once I heard a long electronic beep behind him.
“Microwave,” he said, before I asked.
My neighbor Myrna started knocking on our shared wall when the phone buzzed. Two knocks meant shut it off.
When I asked Zachary at work if the calls could wait for morning, he laughed in front of the two delivery guys.
“You’re salaried in my head, Caitlin,” he said. “Single moms are up all night anyway.”
One of the delivery guys laughed with him. The other one went and stood by the loading door.
So I kept answering. SEVEN months of it.
Then came a Friday in October.
Giulia had been working on a thousand-piece puzzle of a lighthouse since her ninth birthday, and she’d left the last strip of sky so we could do it together.
No school the next day. We put a frozen pizza in at ten and spread out on the living room floor.
At 10:41 my phone buzzed on the coffee table.
Zachary.
I didn’t pick up.
It buzzed again at 10:44. Then 10:46. Then 10:51.
Every buzz walked the phone a little closer to the edge of the puzzle.
“Mom, it’s moving the clouds,” Giulia said.
She held a piece of sky down with one finger until it stopped.
He called NINE times between 10:41 and 11:20.
No voicemail. No text.
Just the phone, crawling toward her lighthouse.
Myrna knocked twice on the wall.
At 11:22 I picked it up and typed with my thumb while Giulia watched me do it.
“I’m home with Giulia. I’m not taking calls about the store after 4:30 anymore. I’ll answer anything you need Monday at 8.”
The little word under it turned to Read at 11:23.
Nothing came back.
No dots.
Seven months of him calling the second he felt like it, and now he had nothing to say.
Giulia pressed the last piece in at 11:58 and made me take a picture of it.
At 12:13 somebody knocked.
Not the wall. The front door.
Myrna’s porch light came on before mine did.
There was a deputy on the step, a woman about my age with a small notebook. Her name tag said Uribe.
“Caitlin?” she said. “You work for Zachary at the furniture store?”
“Yes,” I said. “Is he okay?”
Giulia was behind me in her socks. I reached back without looking and found her shoulder.
“He’s fine,” Deputy Uribe said. “He’s at the store with my sergeant. Somebody opened the office safe tonight.”
“I don’t have the combination,” I said. “I’ve NEVER had it.”
“We know. He told us.”
She turned a page in the notebook.
“He also told us it couldn’t have been him, because he was at home on the phone with you from 10:30 until after eleven. Going over inventory.”
My whole face went hot.
I turned my phone around and held it out to her.
Nine missed calls. ZERO MINUTES TALKED. My text underneath it, Read at 11:23.
She took a picture of my screen with her own phone.
“He gave us your number himself,” she said. “Said you’d back him up. Said you ALWAYS pick up.”
“She didn’t, though,” Giulia said from behind me.
Deputy Uribe looked at her for a second, then back at me.
“Ma’am, the owner says cash has been going missing out of that safe since April,” she said. “Small amounts. Always at night.”
Since April.
“I need you to scroll back to the first call he ever made you,” she said. “And tell me how long it lasted.”
I scrolled.
A Tuesday in April. 11:14 PM. Thirty-one minutes, about a TAPE GUN.
Thirty-one minutes
“Thirty-one minutes,” I said.
Deputy Uribe wrote it down. I held the screen against the doorframe so my hand would stop moving long enough for another picture.
“Did he say where he was?”
“Home. He always said home.”
“Could you see him?”
“No.”
“Then tell me what you heard. Don’t fill anything in.”
I wanted to hand her seven months whole. The questions, the gaps, the times I’d stood in our bathroom with the door closed so Giulia could sleep. Instead I gave her the tape gun and the receipt rolls.
“And the fern,” I said.
“The fern?”
“He needed to know whether to water it.”
Her pen stopped.
“It’s plastic.”
Myrna came across the porch in slippers. She held out a hand to Giulia without asking me anything.
“Come help me find my glasses,” she said.
“They’re on your head,” Giulia said.
“Then this shouldn’t take long.”
I squeezed my daughter’s shoulder before letting go. Myrna took her next door, and I stepped outside with my phone.
“Am I in trouble?”
“I’m checking what you were told and what you can confirm.”
That was a careful answer. I would’ve preferred a careless no.
I told her about the beep. About Zachary saying microwave before I’d asked what it was.
“Does the safe make a sound?” she said.
“Yes. When it opens.”
“The same sound?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t standing beside it.”
She wrote that down too.
A patch of my porch rail needed paint. I picked at it with my thumbnail while she explained that the owner was comparing the safe records with the deposit paperwork. She would need my call history, including the answered calls.
“Don’t delete anything,” she said. “And don’t try to get him to explain himself for us.”
“I have to go to work Monday.”
“I’ll meet you there at nine. The owner wants the paperwork checked before the store opens.”
“My shift starts at eight.”
She looked up from the notebook.
“Then I’ll see you at nine.”
She couldn’t give me the answer I wanted. I understood that. I still wanted to shake it out of her notebook.
Through Myrna’s window, Giulia held both hands above her head to demonstrate where the glasses had been. Myrna performed considerable surprise.
I put my phone in my sweatshirt pocket.
“He’s going to know I showed you.”
“He already knows you didn’t answer.”
The deputy closed her notebook.
That little difference was going to cost me.
The crossed-out hour
In April, the morning after the second late call, I’d written an extra hour on my timecard.
Thirty-one minutes Tuesday. Twenty-nine Wednesday.
Zachary stood beside the register while I showed him. He still had his coat on, and I had the foolish advantage of having practiced my sentence in the car.
“I added the calls,” I said.
He looked at the card.
“What calls?”
“The work calls.”
He took my pen and drew a line through the hour.
I actually laughed. One of those short laughs you make when somebody does something so rude you assume there’s another part coming.
There wasn’t.
“You were home,” he said.
“You called me about work.”
“You answered a couple of questions.”
“For an hour.”
He tapped the crossed-out number.
“Don’t make me explain this to the owner. He sees extra hours, he starts asking whether we need all these counter shifts.”
I had an answer ready for the first sentence. I didn’t have one for my shifts disappearing.
So I stood there with my lunch bag hanging from two fingers.
Zachary could do helpful beautifully. He’d adjusted my starting time once when Giulia’s school opened late. He told people he looked after his staff. When a customer complimented me, he put a hand on my shoulder and said he’d trained me.
He’d trained me to find things he’d put down twelve seconds earlier. Apparently that came with naming rights.
“You need the schedule you’ve got,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Then don’t turn everything into a problem.”
I took the pen back. There was a dent in the paper where he’d crossed out the hour.
Behind him, the office safe beeped because he’d left it open too long. He went back and pushed the door shut with his shoe.
My job was to match the day’s sales with the cash going into a deposit bag. His job was to count it again, sign the sheet and put the bag in the safe. I didn’t touch the keypad.
I’d been grateful for that division. My name stopped at the amount I’d counted.
That morning I slid the timecard beneath the deposit sheet, then pulled it out again.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
I took a picture before handing it over.
He smiled at the phone.
“Keeping a scrapbook?”
“Keeping my hours.”
“Keep the right ones.”
I saved that picture with my other pay records. Every week after that, I photographed the card before he took it.
I didn’t add another late call.
At home that evening, Giulia wanted help with the edge of her lighthouse. Every piece she handed me seemed to fit nowhere, which was also how the day had gone.
“We’ll do some after dinner,” I said.
We did six pieces. Then dishes, her bath, the form in her school bag that apparently required my signature before civilization could continue.
At eleven, the phone rang.
I carried it into the bathroom.
“Where’s the price gun?” Zachary said.
“Under the register.”
He left a gap so long I pulled the phone away to check the call hadn’t dropped.
“Which side?”
“The left.”
Another gap.
I sat on the closed toilet lid. On the other side of the door, Giulia coughed in her sleep.
“You still there, Caitlin?”
“Yes.”
Back on the porch that October night, Deputy Uribe asked whether I had anything else.
I opened the photograph of my timecard.
“He wouldn’t pay me for being there.”
Saturday at the wall
Myrna brought Giulia home after the deputy left.
My daughter walked straight to the coffee table and checked the puzzle. Nothing had moved. She ran a finger along the lighthouse roof anyway.
“Can you send the picture to Myrna?”
“Tomorrow, honey.”
“It’s tomorrow now.”
There was no arguing with her on a technicality. She got that from me, which was inconvenient when I was the defendant.
I sent the picture.
Myrna stayed while I put Giulia to bed. When I came back, she’d plugged my phone into the charger and put a glass of water beside it.
“Drink that before you chew through the glass.”
“I need this job.”
“I know.”
“He signs my card.”
“I know that too.”
She sat beside me while I opened the call records. I wanted her to say he couldn’t do anything to me. Myrna had lived seventy-one years without developing a taste for promises she couldn’t keep.
“Save what the deputy asked for,” she said.
We worked until my eyes hurt. I sent copies of the call history and the texts to the deputy. Myrna made me check that the files had actually sent instead of assuming a little spinning circle meant somebody was handling my life.
Then she made me go to bed.
Saturday morning, I woke to a message from Zachary.
Call me. We need to straighten out last night.
I sat on the edge of the mattress while Giulia brushed her teeth.
Another message arrived.
You know I wouldn’t involve you if I didn’t trust you.
I put the phone face down.
The toothpaste cap rolled into the hall. Giulia chased it with one sock on and asked whether we could leave the puzzle assembled all weekend.
“As long as you want.”
“Even when we eat?”
“We have laps.”
She grinned around the toothbrush.
I wanted to keep that grin. Keeping it seemed to require a paycheck, and the man responsible for the paycheck had sent a third message.
Don’t put anything else in writing until we’ve talked.
I forwarded that one to Deputy Uribe.
Then I answered him.
I told her we didn’t speak Friday. That is what happened.
He called immediately.
The phone rang until it stopped. I sat there with my thumb pressed against the case, ready to answer on the last buzz, the way I’d done for months.
Myrna knocked on the front door this time.
“I brought toast,” she said.
“That’s an odd thing to transport.”
“You weren’t going to make any.”
She handed Giulia the plate and sent her to inspect whether the puzzle lighthouse needed a name. Then she sat beside me.
I showed her the messages.
“Tell him you’ll talk Monday,” she said.
“He’ll say I’m making him wait.”
“He can experience waiting. It may broaden him.”
I typed that I would be at work at eight as scheduled.
He saw it.
For half an hour, nothing came back.
I took a bite of toast. It had gone cold enough to qualify as building material, but I finished it because Myrna kept looking at the plate.
Then the phone lit up.
Don’t clock in Monday until you’ve seen me.
I read it twice.
Myrna reached for the phone, and I held it away. I needed one more second before somebody else saw what he’d done.
That was my first attempt at a boundary: one true sentence, sent from my own bedroom.
By breakfast, he’d reached into Monday’s pay.
The front counter at eight
I left Giulia with Myrna before school on Monday.
My daughter stood in the adjoining doorway with her backpack on. She asked whether I would be home at the usual time.
“Yes.”
“Four-thirty isn’t home. That’s leaving.”
“Then the usual time after four-thirty.”
She accepted the correction. I kissed her forehead and went to work with my phone charged and my stomach empty.
Zachary was behind the counter.
He’d put my timecard on his side of the register. The tape gun lay beside it. I hated that tape gun enough by then to have opinions about its family.
“Morning,” he said.
I put down my bag.
“I’m here for my shift.”
“We need to talk first.”
“Then I’m putting eight on my card.”
He laid his palm over it.
“Let’s not start like that.”
One delivery man came through the loading door. The one who’d laughed when Zachary made the single-mother joke. He looked from me to the card and reached for a delivery sheet.
Zachary gave him a smile.
“Little misunderstanding. We’ll be a minute.”
I wanted to tell the man to stay. I also wanted him to leave before I cried. Both wishes fit inside my chest, with room left over for nausea.
“What’s the misunderstanding?” I said.
Zachary moved toward the office.
“In here.”
“No. Here is fine.”
His smile went away.
“You’re making this uncomfortable.”
“It is uncomfortable.”
He leaned against the counter.
“I got my times mixed up Friday. That’s all. I talk to you so often, one night runs into another.”
“Then tell the deputy that.”
“I did. But you gave her the impression I was lying.”
“You said we’d talked. We hadn’t.”
He rubbed his forehead as if I’d brought him a math problem during lunch.
“Caitlin. Think about how many nights you’ve kept me on the phone.”
I stared at him.
“Kept you?”
“You talk about your daughter. Your rent. School things. It’s not always business.”
Because a man calls your house and asks how your day was between questions about receipt rolls, apparently he owns the next thirty minutes.
“You called me,” I said.
“And you answered.”
The delivery man folded his paper smaller.
Zachary turned toward him.
“You’ve heard her. She’s perfectly happy to chat.”
The man gave a little shrug.
I couldn’t tell what he’d heard. I could tell he wasn’t going to help.
Zachary slid my card farther away.
“The owner wants the numbers checked. Until that’s done, we don’t need you handling cash.”
“I can do invoices.”
“We’ll see.”
“I can answer the front.”
“We’ll see, Caitlin.”
My hours had become a favor he hadn’t decided whether to grant.
I pulled out my phone and opened the message confirming my shift.
“You told me to come in.”
“To see me. Not to clock in. Read it.”
I read it again even though I knew every word.
He waited. The delivery man waited too. I had spent three years being the person who found their missing paperwork while they waited, and my hands kept wanting to straighten the counter.
“How long am I off?” I said.
“That depends how quickly this gets cleared up.”
I sent his message to the deputy, then put the phone away.
“She’s coming at nine.”
“I know.”
He picked up my card and carried it toward the office.
My regular week went with him.
The plastic fern
The second delivery man came in while I was still standing at the counter.
He’d gone to the loading door when Zachary made the joke about single mothers. I had remembered that as kindness.
That morning, I needed more than a man facing the correct direction.
“Can you stay a minute?” I said.
He stopped beside the fern.
Zachary came back from the office without my timecard.
“Everybody has work,” he said.
“So do I.”
“We’ve been over that.”
The delivery man put his keys down.
“What do you need?”
I pointed at the counter.
“When I asked him to stop calling at night, you were here.”
His face changed. He glanced toward the loading door, which had apparently become his preferred address.
“I remember you talking.”
“Do you remember what he said?”
Zachary spread his hands.
“I made a joke. If she took it badly, I’m sorry she took it badly.”
The first delivery man studied the delivery sheet so hard he could’ve memorized somebody’s sectional.
I said the words Zachary had used.
“Single moms are up all night anyway.”
Nobody laughed this time.
“Come on,” Zachary said. “You’re acting like I dragged you out of bed.”
“You called until I answered.”
“You could’ve turned the phone off.”
“And you could’ve found the tape gun.”
He shoved it across the counter.
“There. Found it.”
The thing hit my bag.
I wanted to throw it at the fern. Plastic against plastic. At least one of them would’ve been useful for once.
Instead I set it back beside the register.
Zachary looked at the delivery men.
“This is what I’m dealing with. I try to help somebody, make allowances for school pickup, and suddenly I’m the bad guy.”
The second man shifted his keys from one hand to the other.
“You did say she needed to answer,” he said.
Zachary turned.
“When?”
“A few months ago. She missed one. You said if she wanted those hours, she needed to be available.”
For a second, I could breathe without working at it.
Then Zachary said, “Available for work. Obviously.”
“At eleven?” the man said.
Zachary pointed toward the loading door.
“You can get the truck ready.”
The man looked at me. I waited.
He picked up his keys.
That hurt more than the laugh had. I’d given his silence a better meaning than he’d earned.
When the loading door shut, Zachary came around the counter.
“You’re upsetting people who have nothing to do with this.”
“I asked him what he heard.”
“You asked him to take sides.”
The first delivery man left too. He didn’t look up on his way.
Now Zachary had the room he wanted.
He lowered himself onto the stool I used while matching invoices.
“You told me yourself you were behind on your electric bill last spring.”
I felt my face heat.
“You said the after-school fees had gone up. You cried on the phone, Caitlin. I stayed on with you.”
I’d cried once. It was after midnight, and he’d asked whether I could come in early while I was trying to figure out which payment could wait until Friday.
I had said too much because I was tired.
He had remembered every useful word.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I’m reminding you I have been decent to you.”
“You don’t get to use that.”
“Use what? Your own conversations?”
He was sitting on my stool, telling me what my life cost, and I couldn’t think past the fact that he’d said electric bill loudly enough for the men in back to hear.
I picked up my bag.
Zachary stood.
“Walking out won’t look good.”
I put the bag down again.
That was the worst part of the morning until then. Not his voice. My own hand obeying it.
He reached for the office door and held it open.
“Let’s talk about Friday without an audience.”
I stayed beside the fern.
He let the door swing shut between us.
Eight forty-seven
He came out holding a sheet of paper.
“I wrote down what happened,” he said. “Read it before you make another thing out of this.”
The first line said we regularly spoke after hours about inventory.
The next said I knew he was at home during those conversations.
Below that, he had written that he believed we had spoken Friday and I’d corrected the date.
There was a place for my signature.
I read it standing up.
“I don’t know where you were.”
“You heard my television.”
“I heard a television.”
“You heard me making food.”
“You said you were making food.”
He tapped the line.
“Nobody’s asking you to lie.”
“Then take that part out.”
“It explains the confusion.”
“It says I know.”
He took the paper back and read it as though a stranger had written it.
“You are picking at words.”
“They’re above my name.”
He set it down again.
I wanted to sign the version where he crossed out the home part. I wanted that so badly it embarrassed me. Let him have his confusion. Let him give me back my card. Let me go home with enough hours to keep the lights on.
My phone showed eight forty-seven.
Thirteen minutes until Deputy Uribe arrived.
Zachary saw me check.
“You don’t need a deputy to settle a disagreement with your boss.”
“She asked me to be here.”
“And you’re here. Fine. But you and I still have to work together after she leaves.”
He pushed the sheet closer.
“Unless you don’t want to.”
I could hear the delivery men moving something behind the loading door. Neither came through.
“Are you firing me?” I said.
“I’m asking whether you’re willing to cooperate.”
“With what?”
“With clearing up something you know isn’t what she’s making it.”
I pulled my phone out and opened the nine missed calls.
He didn’t look.
“I know you didn’t answer Friday,” he said.
There it was, said as casually as where we kept the labels.
“So why did you give her my number?”
“Because you know me.”
“I know where the tape gun goes.”
He turned away, then came back.
“Do you have any idea what an accusation like this does to a person?”
“Yes.”
“No, you don’t. You’ve got a job to worry about. I’ve got my whole life.”
I nearly said that my whole life ate breakfast in the other half of a duplex and needed me home on time.
I wasn’t giving him another thing to repeat.
He pointed at the paper.
“Sign what you can confirm.”
I crossed out the sentence about his house. I crossed out his account of Friday. What remained said he called me after hours to ask work questions.
I slid it toward him.
“That.”
He read the cuts.
His face went red.
“You don’t get to rewrite everything.”
“You told me to sign what I could confirm.”
He picked up my bag from the counter and set it on the floor beside my feet.
“Leave your key.”
For a moment, I couldn’t separate the little key from the rest of the ring. My car key kept folding over it.
He held out his hand.
I thought about the school payment due Friday. I thought about going next door and telling Myrna she’d need to keep Giulia a little longer because I couldn’t walk into our kitchen yet.
Then I worked the store key free.
It left a groove across my thumbnail.
“Put my eight o’clock start on the card,” I said.
“Leave the key, Caitlin.”
I laid it on his paper.
The hour underneath
Deputy Uribe arrived while my key was still on the counter.
Zachary reached for it. I put my hand beside his paper.
“She needs to see this.”
He pulled his hand away.
“It’s just a statement. She disagreed with the wording.”
The deputy read it without picking it up.
Then she looked at me.
“Did you sign?”
“No.”
“Good. Tell me only what you know.”
Zachary began before I could.
“We talked practically every night. She knows that. I don’t understand why we’re pretending these calls didn’t happen because I got one date wrong.”
His own words sat there between us.
Practically every night.
I took out my phone and opened the photograph from April.
“Can you get my timecards?” I said.
Zachary stared at me.
“We’re talking about missing money.”
“I need my cards.”
Uribe looked from the photograph to him.
“Where are they?”
“In the office.”
“They’re hers to look at, aren’t they?”
He went to get them. He wanted to look reasonable in front of her. I could use reasonable for a few minutes.
While he was gone, I opened the totals Myrna and I had made from the call records.
We hadn’t set out to add the minutes. We had been copying them for the deputy. But Myrna was retired, not dead, and she wasn’t going to sit beside that many numbers without adding something.
Sixty-eight hours and twenty-three minutes.
I had made each call fit somewhere in our life. Between dishes and sleep. After a nightmare. While folding the same shirt until I forgot whose it was.
On the screen, they took up more than a week and a half.
Zachary put the cards down.
“Now what?”
I found April.
The crossed-out hour was still there.
“You said these weren’t work.”
He glanced at Uribe.
“I said she wasn’t authorized for extra hours.”
“You called me.”
“I didn’t tell you to put it on your timecard.”
I took his statement and turned it so he could read the first line.
Regularly spoke after hours about inventory.
“Which part should I show the owner?” I said.
He looked at the statement, then the card.
“That’s a separate issue.”
“Then we can do it separately.”
I set the call totals beside the timecards.
Every week in that stack already had forty hours. Every late call belonged after those hours.
Zachary gave a little laugh.
“So this is about getting money.”
I wanted to argue with that. I’d been trained to be grateful before I was allowed to be paid.
“Yes,” I said.
He stopped smiling.
“And Friday?” Uribe said.
I opened the unanswered calls.
“I didn’t speak to him Friday. On the other nights, I answered work questions. I can’t say where he was.”
I pushed his statement back.
“You can confirm the calls.”
Behind the deposit bags
Zachary stood over the papers.
“You understand what she’s doing,” he said to Uribe. “She’s angry about her schedule.”
The deputy kept her notebook open.
“Did you make the calls?”
“I’ve said I did.”
“For inventory questions?”
“Among other things.”
“What other things?”
He pointed at me.
“She talked about her personal life. She can be on the phone awhile.”
I let him finish.
That was new for me. Usually, I helped him out of a sentence before he had to stand inside it.
Uribe wrote something down.
“Which Friday call did you mistake for last Friday?”
“I’d have to check.”
“Then check.”
He took out his phone.
The first delivery man came through the loading door, saw the deputy and stopped. The other followed him.
Zachary put his phone down.
“Could we have some privacy?”
I said, “They heard you tell me to leave my key.”
Both men stayed.
Uribe looked at the key on the statement.
“What was that about?”
“An employment matter,” Zachary said.
“Because she wouldn’t sign this?”
“Because of her conduct this morning.”
“What conduct?”
He started with disrespect. He moved to insubordination. By the time he got to how much he’d done for me, the delivery man who’d laughed was looking at the floor.
Zachary had plenty of words for my conduct. None included stealing.
I moved the key off his paper.
“Sign the calls you agree you made.”
“I’m not signing a confession.”
“It says you called me about work.”
“And then what? You want seven months of overtime because we chatted?”
“Sixty-eight hours and twenty-three minutes.”
He laughed again. It didn’t get any help.
“She’s counted it to the minute.”
“Your phone counted it too,” I said.
He turned to the men.
“You hear this?”
The one beside the fern spoke.
“I heard you tell her to answer.”
Zachary pointed toward the back.
“And I’ve told you to get the truck ready.”
The man didn’t move.
“You told her it went with keeping her hours.”
I kept my eyes on the counter. If I looked at him, I might cry, and I wanted Zachary to finish first.
Uribe asked to see the deposit sheets.
I showed her where they were kept. Zachary moved toward the drawer, then stopped when she asked me to get them.
Behind the deposit bags.
I moved the tape gun aside.
The owner had given her the safe’s opening records and the banked amounts. She laid copies beside the sheets I’d prepared and Zachary had signed.
She asked me to explain my part.
“I counted what was here at closing. He counted it again. We signed the amount. He put the bag in the safe.”
“Did you ever open it after that?”
“No.”
Zachary leaned over the papers.
“There are adjustments. Refunds. Things she doesn’t handle.”
“Show me,” Uribe said.
He reached toward one sheet, pulled back, then chose another.
“Cash can come out for refunds.”
“Where’s the refund?”
“It’ll be filed.”
“Find it.”
He didn’t move toward the files.
I had spent the weekend thinking my phone was going to decide everything. It could prove he lied about Friday. It couldn’t show whose hands took the cash.
The sheets on the counter carried his signature beside my count. The safe records showed openings after closing. The deposits were short.
The calls covered some of those openings.
They gave him a person to name, someone who would say yes when asked whether he’d been busy at home.
Except I couldn’t put him at home. I never could.
Uribe pointed to one night.
“Is this when you heard the beep?”
“I’d have to check my notes.”
Zachary spoke before I could open them.
“A microwave can beep.”
The deputy turned toward him.
“I haven’t said it couldn’t.”
He stepped back from the counter.
I put the statement in front of him again.
He stared at me as if I was being rude about a coupon while his house burned.
“You want this signed now?”
“Yes.”
“After all this?”
“Yes.”
He grabbed the pen.
“Fine. We talked about work. Put that on your little tally.”
He signed beside the sentence he’d written himself.
I took a picture, then the paper.
Uribe asked him to come into the office to go through the missing refunds. He told her he wanted to call someone before answering anything else.
She said he could.
At the doorway, he turned to me.
“You’d better hope the owner appreciates what you’ve done.”
The first delivery man stepped away from the door.
“I laughed when you said that thing about her being a single mom,” he said.
Zachary stared at him.
The man looked at me.
“I shouldn’t have.”
“No,” I said.
He swallowed.
“I’ll tell the owner what I heard.”
Zachary went into the office.
This time, nobody followed him for instructions.
Sixty-eight hours
I didn’t get my shift back that morning.
Deputy Uribe told me the owner wanted the store closed while the deposits were checked. She passed along his request that I send him copies of my cards and the call records.
I sent Zachary’s signed sentence too.
Then I picked up my key from the counter and put it in an envelope for the owner. I wasn’t giving Zachary anything else by hand.
Outside, I got into my car and cried before I could start it.
I cried for the school payment. I cried because one man had apologized and another had stayed beside a plastic fern. I cried because my phone wasn’t ringing.
Myrna opened her door before I reached mine.
“How bad?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She put her arms around me.
I held on. I was thirty-four years old, and that morning I needed somebody who would let me ruin a shoulder without asking what the plan was.
When Giulia came home, I was on our floor beside the puzzle.
“You’re early,” she said.
“Yes.”
She set down her backpack.
“Are you sick?”
“No.”
“Did the man call?”
“No.”
She sat beside me. I told her there was a problem at work, that the adults were dealing with it, and that none of it was her job.
She studied the lighthouse.
“Can we keep this together?”
“Yes.”
“For longer than the weekend?”
“Yes.”
She put her hand over mine. It was sticky from something at school. I left it there.
The store reopened Thursday.
By then, the owner had removed Zachary from the schedule and taken back his keys. Uribe passed that information to me when she called about another deposit sheet.
She also said the owner wanted me back at my regular hours. He had my number now. He could send the request himself.
He did.
I answered in writing.
I would return at eight. After-hours work would have to be approved, recorded and paid. I wouldn’t accept instructions through Zachary.
The reply agreed to all of it.
At the counter Thursday morning, the two delivery men were waiting for their sheets.
The one who’d stayed beside the fern put my timecard where I could reach it.
Eight was written on the line.
I checked it before I put down my bag.
The next pay envelope contained a separate payment for the calls.
The gross amount was $1,846.35.
Sixty-eight hours and twenty-three minutes at the overtime rate. The calls had been made in weeks when I’d already worked my forty hours.
I checked the total twice. Then I checked the extra pay for the Monday morning Zachary had tried to keep off my card.
That was there too.
I took a picture and sent it to Myrna.
She answered, Now eat something that came with a fork.
I laughed hard enough that the delivery man looked over.
I held up the envelope.
“He signed the hours.”
The key on the counter
Zachary came back three weeks later to collect his belongings.
I knew he was coming. The owner had arranged the time through Deputy Uribe, and she came to speak with him about the money before he left.
I could’ve stayed in the office.
Instead, I stood at my counter.
The delivery men were there. Myrna waited near the front window because I’d asked her to drive me that day. I didn’t trust my hands on the steering wheel if he started again.
Zachary carried his office things in a box. He stopped when he saw her.
“Who’s this?”
“My ride.”
He looked at the men.
“Quite a gathering.”
Nobody answered.
His key was on the counter. The owner had changed the safe combination and removed his access to the store. His name was gone from the schedule.
The missing cash had been counted.
$8,412.60.
Uribe had asked me to check my signed closing amounts against the owner’s final total. I sat with every sheet. No guessing. No rounding because everybody was tired of looking.
Zachary had returned that amount to the owner. Uribe made clear that returning it didn’t end the investigation.
His job was gone. The owner hadn’t agreed to take him back.
I hadn’t lost a dollar of the hours he’d tried to cancel.
He set the box on the counter and pointed at my timecard.
“So who’s signing that now?”
“The owner.”
“Good luck getting anything done with him.”
I put the card in its place.
He could still make me want to explain. That annoyed me almost as much as the rest.
The delivery man who’d laughed came forward.
“I told him what happened,” he said. “About the calls. And the card.”
Zachary shook his head.
“Everybody’s got a story now.”
“You were here,” the man said.
Zachary looked at Uribe.
“Am I finished?”
“For today.”
He picked up his box.
Myrna moved away from the front window. She’d been studying the plastic fern with the expression she used on produce she wasn’t buying.
“That thing really is plastic,” she said.
I laughed.
I hadn’t meant to. It came out all at once, too loud for the room.
Zachary looked from her to me.
“Glad somebody finds this funny.”
I pressed my fingers against my mouth. Myrna took my bag off the stool and held it out.
The clock above the counter reached four-thirty.
I wrote the time on my card.
Zachary stayed between me and the door.
For seven months, I’d waited for him to run out of questions. He always found one more. Where were the labels? Which drawer? Was I still there?
Now he lowered the box.
“Caitlin. You know I helped you when you needed it.”
I took my bag from Myrna.
“You could at least say something after everything. I lost my job.”
The payment receipt was in the front pocket of my bag. My regular hours were on the card behind me. At home, my daughter had the lighthouse on the coffee table and no reason to save the evening for a man looking for tape.
Zachary shifted the box against his hip.
“Can I call you later? Just us.”
“No. I’m off the clock.”
I walked past him with my wages in my bag.
If this one stayed with you, send it to someone whose work keeps calling after they’ve gone home.
When someone decides your time and dignity don’t matter, standing up for yourself can change everything – though the fallout may be surprising. For more stories about family betrayals and unexpected turning points, read My Son Gave Away My Chair Beside Him, My Ex-Husband Cut Me Out Of Our Son’s Airport Photograph, and My Ex-Husband Put My Name Beside The Kitchen Door.
