Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 94048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 470(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 470(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
She goes on like that for a while. I drink my Diet Coke and nod along and make encouraging comments, because I really do want her to dump Danny—the guy is an absolute monster of a human being and doesn’t deserve to breathe—but we’ve had this conversation a few dozen times at this point. They’ll fight, Danny will apologize, they’ll bang, she’ll swoon, the karmic cycle restarts.
It’d be depressing, but the predictability is almost a comfort in these trying times.
Once our break’s over, it’s back to work. Cucina’s quiet on a Wednesday evening, and all I can see as I wait tables and run orders are all the men sitting around at the bar, dining with much younger and dolled-up girls at the tables, even a few older guys wearing lots of fake-looking gold jewelry buying their wives an extra drink or two in the booths. But all of them talk loud, laugh louder, eat too much, drink too much, and curse like it’s their life’s work to come up with an original insult.
I can’t stop thinking about the duffel bag.
Rachel and I are both closing tonight. Once the place clears out, I’ll do most of the work while she argues on the phone with Danny. Ethan will be busy wrapping up the bar and yelling at Rachel, and nobody will be paying attention for at least a half hour—which is more than enough time to slip back into the office, grab the money, sneak out the back door, and stash it in the dumpster.
I won’t take everything. Just a few hundred dollars. Enough that Ethan will go along on his blissful way without ever realizing what happened.
It’s not like I’m taking it for me. Isn’t there a long tradition of thieves stealing from the rich and giving to the poor? Cucina Amore is doing just fine, whoever owns this place won’t even notice if a couple stacks of cash disappear, and it’ll mean everything to me.
It’ll mean my father might not get evicted from his house for one more month.
Which is all I can think about. My seventy-six-year-old father, on Social Security, drained of retirement savings, with a second mortgage on the house he grew up in, the house that he raised me in, the house where my mother died—the house that he wants to die in. That house means everything to us. And it might be gone in three lousy weeks unless I come up with more money to make a payment large enough to keep the bank off my ass until I can figure out what to do long-term.
This situation isn’t tenable. It hasn’t been tenable for months, but I was making it work. I serve tables here at Cucina Amore in the evenings, and for a while I was getting up early to work phones in a call center all day. I was netting exactly four hours of sleep per night, which is apparently not nearly enough, because I fell asleep in the middle of a conversation with a very kind older lady named Jan who seemed interested in buying a warranty program for her personal computer, which is honest-to-god real and not some piece-of-shit scam, I double-checked before taking the job, and I woke up to a dial tone and my manager firing my ass on the spot.
Now here I am with visions of the bank taking away the only thing my elderly father has left while walking past the office every few minutes.
This is doable. Stupid, dangerous, but doable. I make my plan as my shift gets deeper into the night. Closing goes exactly the same every single time, and all I have to do is be smart. I know Ethan’s routine. I know exactly what Rachel’s going to do. There’s a window, a little golden moment of time where they’re both busy, and I can take advantage of it.
I can steal from my employer.
I don’t feel good about that. I’m honestly learning a lot about myself these days. Turns out that sinking down deep past rock bottom and toward the blackest depths of the Mariana’s Trench reveals things about a person. For example, I’m morally flexible. I did not realize that. I’ve always thought of myself as an inherently good person: I don’t honk at cars when they don’t start moving the second a light turns green, I pet every dog that comes up to sniff me, I wave to the guys that drive the garbage trucks, and I always tip my barista, even when all she does is pour some coffee into a cup. I never would have imagined that I could steal in any meaningful way even a few weeks ago.
Now I know that I’m willing to go to any lengths to protect the people that I love.
Even if it’s protecting them from themselves.