Fuck Express, Kendra thought, applying lip gloss to her sulking mouth. Express practically forced her to steal from the till by paying such shit wages. And her own salary was only the beginning of its crimes. The corporation stole much more cruelly from the Chinese women who made the clothes. It stole from the sheep herders who made the wool for its sweaters. And for that matter, the sheep herders themselves stole from the poor animals they raised to harvest the wool off their backs. It was all robbery, up and down the line. Every step of the way someone was stealing from somebody, someone was profiting off somebody else’s weakness. So she took a few dollars in the last moments of the cycle. She was only playing by the rules of the game as they had been established long before her birth.

Kendra dabbed cover-up onto the acne on her chin and evened the color. She did not feel guilty about what she had done, not in the least, but she did have to rectify the situation quickly. If Nathan made the effort to compare the weekly returns of the past three months to the inventory on the shelves, he would find upward of two thousand dollars missing. And that, she could see, would be a real problem.

Kendra pulled on her woolen pea coat and wound a scarf around her neck. With some luck, she thought, the whole situation could still be made to look like an overnight accounting error. Perhaps some cash had fallen under the register, or onto a table, or a few bills had drifted into a corner by accident. In any case, she had to move fast. The longer the money went missing, the more suspicious Nathan would become, and the more likely her punishment would be unavoidable.

The annoying vacuum drew near her door, banging against the baseboards.

“I’m going out!” Kendra yelled through the door.

“What?” her mother cried in Russian. After twenty years she still couldn’t find their house on a map.

“I’m going out!” Kendra said again through the wall.

“Where?!”

“Work!”

The bus picked her up at the corner of 135th and Stark, in front of the Romanian Orthodox church, and slowly wended its way down the numbers, crossing through wintry Vietnamese neighborhoods, Laotian neighborhoods, Chinese neighborhoods, passing churches with Korean lettering and strip malls that could have been in Beijing. It was sunset by the time the oasis of downtown appeared, the pink and black and silver lacquered boxes nestled against the velvet folds of the West Hills, and Kendra’s daily journey from Russia to Asia to America was complete.