The Timecards I Laid Down

“Tell her how,” Kowalski said. Not cruel. Just a man who wanted it all on the table.

“I was in the system every day anyway,” Deb said. “Fixing everybody’s punches. And I saw that nobody, nobody, ever looked at the paper anymore. The clipboard, the slips, all of it, it just got thrown away. So I told myself the paper didn’t exist. I told myself if nobody checks it, it isn’t real.” She pressed her lips. “I took one bonus. The first year I was that scared. One. Six hundred dollars. And it was so easy and nobody noticed and the next year I took it again, and then it was just a thing I did every December, and I stopped letting myself think about whose it was.” She looked at me. “It was yours. Every year it was yours. I knew the number. 2207. I knew it was yours the whole time.”

I did not say anything.

“I kept thinking you’d never know,” she said. “Because who keeps eleven years of paper.”

“I do,” I said.

“I know that now,” she said, and almost laughed, the awful kind, and put her hand over her mouth.

What I asked

Kowalski looked at me. “I want to be straight with you, since you’re the one she stole from,” he said. “The bonuses go back to you, all of it, with what you’re owed. She’s off the timeclock as of today, and the records, somebody else runs them now and I audit them against Ronnie’s paper every quarter. That part’s done.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“The other part,” he said. “The firing. And whether this goes further than firing, because it could. I’ll be honest, that’s partly my call and partly over my head, but what you want carries weight here, Sheila. You’re the one she took from. So I’m asking you. What do you want me to do with her.”

The room waited. Deb would not look at me now. She was looking at the floor like it might open.

I thought about Roy. I thought about those three months after he passed, going through drawers in the dark, not knowing whose name was on what, the fear of a thing being taken because you could not prove it was yours. I thought about what it is to be drowning and to tell yourself a small lie because the truth is a thing you cannot afford that month.

I did not forgive her because she deserved it. She did not deserve it. She took eleven of my Decembers and she knew the whole time they were mine.

But I knew what a sick husband costs. I had buried mine. And a woman who has watched her man go, slow or fast, does not hand another woman’s husband over to the machine alone if she can help it.