The one thing I meant to do was leave the coffee on.
There was a family checked in on my last night, driving cross country to bury somebody, set to leave before dawn. I had told them the pot would be hot and the lobby lit when they came down, and thirty years I had never once broken that kind of promise to a traveler. A new manager could call me a thief, but he could not make me leave that family to a dark lobby and a cold pot at four in the morning. So I came in early, before my own name was cleared or dirtied, and got the coffee going for people I would never see again.
While it brewed, I did the other thing. I opened the drawer where I had kept every one of my shift-count slips for thirty years.
End of every single shift, I counted that till and signed a slip for it and dropped it in that drawer, and I never threw one away. Call it habit. Call it an old mans caution. That morning I called it the best thing I ever did.
There in my own hand was the count from my last shift, the till full and square and signed, which meant whatever came up short happened on the day clerks watch, hours after I had gone home under the stars.
The till was never short on me. It went short the next day, off the register the day boy ran, and the manager needed an old salary gone and figured the night man would just fade off without a fight.
The family came down while I was standing there with that slip in my hand. They found the coffee hot and the lobby warm, the way I had promised, and the mother thanked me like it was a bigger thing than it was. To a family driving toward a funeral, maybe it was.
The owners came in early for the Friday lunch, and I laid thirty years of signed slips on that desk, ending with the one that cleared me clean. It did not take them long to see it. It would not have taken that manager long either, if he had looked before he humiliated me at the desk in front of a checking-in guest.
He is not the manager anymore.
They asked me to stay on nights. I told them thirty years was a good round number to end on, but that I would break in whoever they hired, and teach the young one to count the till and sign the slip every shift, because someday that habit might be the only thing standing between an honest clerk and a boss in a hurry.
Then I poured myself a cup and watched that family pull out onto the interstate toward whatever was waiting for them, coffee warm in their hands.
