I performed calm.

I kept my face professional and my voice even while something inside me screamed, because that is the discipline the working poor learn earliest and best: how to absorb an injustice without letting it show, how to keep smiling while you are being robbed, because showing what you feel is a luxury reserved for people who can afford the consequences of feeling it.

I swallowed it.

I went to the back, and I took out my tip envelope, and with shaking hands I counted out four single hundred-dollar bills, nearly everything I had made that week, and I carried them back and I put them in Julian’s hand, just so that I would be allowed to clock out and go home.