When there’s too much cash in the register I take out small stacks and push them down into the safe, through a slot in the counter. I lay the bills across the slot and shove them in with a thin plastic wedge, like the scrapers I used in another job I once had to scour grills caked with butter and grease. The idea is if someone robbed me, they’d only get what was left in the drawer and not clean the store out, but there’s no point because the safe is never actually locked and I would tell a robber that right away if he asked. And the cameras on the ceiling are fakes—they aren’t wired to anything. Only the measuring tape on the doorway is real.
Every time I push money into the safe I think of a poem I read about a leaky vessel, something I wrote about on an exam I crammed for all night, and it’s fitting, I guess, that I can’t remember it now. Any more than the customers I talk to in here are likely to recall what we talked about later. They’ll remember a blue apron with a glimmer of gold pinned upon it, and someone to blame when their lottery tickets are worthless.