Nora had found the place the way she found everything on the road, by pinching the map open on her phone until the chain logos slid off the screen and the pins that were left had apostrophes in their names. Four and a half stars, ninety-one reviews, eleven miles past the plant on a state road with no shoulder.
The booth is dark red vinyl, repaired along eighty millimeters of one seam with tape of a slightly different red. Dale ordered before she finished reading the specials. He kept a stubby flathead screwdriver in his shirt pocket where a pen would go, and when the food arrived he set it on the table beside his fork, the way another man might set down his phone.
They had spent eleven hours in the packaging hall persuading a new servo case packer to stop faulting on a photo eye that the customer’s maintenance lead swore had never given anybody a minute of trouble. It had given somebody trouble. The wire was landed one terminal off, and had been landed one terminal off since the OEM crated it, and nobody had ever run the I/O checkout, because running the I/O checkout is boring.
The catfish was fine. The green beans had been cooked with something smoked in the pot, which was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to a green bean. Their server brought a second basket of hush puppies without being asked, forgot the tartar sauce twice, and let both tea glasses sit empty through most of the entrée.
“Fourteen an hour on that line,” Dale said. “Fifteen with the shift differential, if the differential survived the last round.”
“That seems low for what they’re doing.”
“It’s the going rate.” He turned his glass a quarter turn on the ring it had left. “We bill one eighty-five an hour for me. Two twenty on a Saturday. Nobody has ever asked me whether that seemed low.”
The check came in a black vinyl folder with one corner repaired in packing tape. KAYLA T., TABLE 12, printed across the top above a column of line items that added to eighty-one dollars and forty cents. Nora took it, because Dale had taken it the night before.
She tilted her phone toward the window and ran the numbers under the edge of the table. The onboarding deck had said reasonable and customary. She had emailed her manager what that meant and he had said use your judgment, which is what people say when they would rather not put a figure in writing. She wrote fifteen dollars on the tip line, looked at it a second longer than the number deserved, and signed.
They were three steps from the booth when Dale stopped walking.
“Nope,” he said. “Come back.”
She came back. He had the folder open on the table and he was pointing at the tip line with the screwdriver, tapping the paper twice.
“Change it.”
Heat climbed her neck. Fifteen on eighty-one was eighteen and a half percent, and she had checked it twice. “I can bring it down to twelve, if you think that’s...”
“Up.” He waited. “Whose money is on that line?”
“The company’s.”
“Right. It was gone the day they cut the PO. Whatever you don’t write on that line goes back into an account with nine digits in front of it, and you will never be shown that number.”
She picked up the pen, which advertised a bank that had been acquired twice and was down to its last quarter inch of ink.
“Twenty?”
“Higher.”
“Twenty-five?” It came out higher than she meant it to. She had never left twenty-five percent on anything in her life, including the night she got the offer letter. “That’s going to get flagged.”
“By who? The portal takes the total. Somebody in Chicago approves eleven hundred of these on a Monday morning and goes to lunch.” Dale put his hand flat on the table and lowered his voice. “That number is a rounding error in a travel budget you will never be shown,” he said. “It’s Kayla’s whole night. Higher.”
She did not reach for her phone. She crossed out the fifteen with two hard strokes, and the pen skipped, and she bore down and wrote a number underneath it, hard enough that it came through onto the carbon copy.
Dale glanced at it on his way past, and nodded, and held the door.