The Bill My Manager Made Me Pay
I thought about calling the number listed for the state labor board that same night. I got as far as saving it in my phone under a contact named simply Ohio, and then I put the phone face down on the nightstand and told myself I would think about it in the morning, when I was not running on four hours of sleep and eleven dollars.
The call came the next morning at seven fifteen, while I was still in bed. Rick’s name on my screen, which by itself was strange, because Rick did not call people. Rick texted the schedule and otherwise pretended employees did not exist outside their shifts.
“Can you come in?” he said, when I picked up. His voice sounded different. Not the flat, closing-a-conversation voice from the night before. Something underneath it, something I had never heard from him before, which I would later understand was fear.
“I’m not on until four.”
“Now, Kelsey. Please.”
He said please. In two years, I do not think I had heard Rick Hollis say please to an employee a single time.
I drove to the Millstone with my hair still wet, half convinced he was going to fire me for something, some new violation invented overnight to justify not paying me back. Instead I found him standing in the empty dining room before the lunch crew had even come in, holding something out toward me with both hands like it might go off.
It was a small black digital recorder, the kind you can buy off a shelf at any electronics counter, and beside it, a folder, the plain manila kind, with a single word written on the tab in blue pen: Millstone.
“The overnight cleaning crew found this wedged down behind the cushion at table eleven,” he said. “It was recording. The whole time. I already listened to some of it.”
“Recording what?”
“Us,” he said. “You and me. Last night. In my office.”
My stomach went cold before my brain had caught up to why.
“There’s more,” he said, and he opened the folder with hands that were not quite steady, and inside were photocopied pages, a spreadsheet with dates going back almost two years, names I recognized. Priya. Marisol. A busser named Lyle who had left for a warehouse job the previous spring. Dollar amounts next to each name. Six months. Nine months. Fourteen months ago. Every single walkout Rick had ever pushed onto an employee instead of eating himself, laid out in a column like a ledger of small cruelties nobody outside that kitchen had ever been meant to see.
“Where did this come from?” I asked, even though some part of me had already guessed.
“They weren’t customers,” Rick said. “Brent and Vanessa. They work for Wexler Hospitality Group. Corporate. Loss prevention and compliance.”