After I kissed Mist thoroughly for her hilariously brutal -- and descriptive -- shut-down of Yvette, we walked inside the restaurant, the last ones to arrive.
"Why is she even here?" Pilar asked, and before I could say anything, both my Abuela and my father turned on my sister.
"If you weren't needed here today, you'd be gone," my father said to her and his tone was as harsh and pissed as I'd ever heard it. "You need to sit down and shut up, Pilar, because I'm about to cloud up and rain all over you."
My sister's eyes widened because she wasn't used to hearing our father speak to her, or anyone, like that. Ever.
"You, quiet!" Abuela said to Pilar, one finger pointing at my sister. As always, she kept her commands short and simple and when she spoke like that, you listened. "Mist, you come sit by me."
After squeezing Mist's hand, I let go of it, and she walked over and sat right beside my grandmother. Abuela said something to Mist, then patted her hand. My mother sat on Mist's other side, the message clear.
We've got your girl covered. I smiled at my mother and she smiled back.
"Let's get this unpleasantness started so we can get it over with," my dad said.
"What unpleasantness? I don't appreciate being kept in the dark about this," Yvette's father, Ignacio, said.
"As fifty-one percent owner of the restaurant, I can make decisions without consulting you," my father reminded him.
"It's always been joint decisions before," Ignacio objected.
"Well, in this case, given the subject matter, I thought it best to keep it close. Someone's been stealing from the restaurant in a variety of creative ways and it's all with wines and beers. They've been writing off bottles of expensive wine as samples; selling expensive wines and giving customers cheaper ones and pocketing the difference. There's also been an increase in damaged inventory being written off. Finally, this same person's been undercharging customers and keeping the difference. Some things are hard to track in the point of sale system -- they can only be caught if we take a physical inventory."
Pilar looked at Yvette, something ugly beginning to cross her face.
"You've been insisting on doing inventory!"
"Pilar, I wouldn't --"
"Fortunately, with the cameras we installed, we were able to see who was taking bottles of wine out of inventory, hiding them with the recyclables so no one would think twice about trips outside to her car with the three hundred dollar bottles of wine," I said, interrupting the fight that was brewing between my sister and Yvette.
I sent out the video to everyone's phones. "Check your phones for video of the culprit."
Everyone took out their phones and looked at the footage.
"Yvette?" her mother cried. "There's some mistake!"
"Even with the video adding at least ten pounds, that's definitely Yvette," one of my brothers drawled.
"Cameras?" Yvette asked, sounding strangled.
"Yeah, cameras in several strategic locations," I said. "We've been watching you for more than a month. We went back more than a year ago and started tracking down the inventory discrepancies, all the ways things weren't adding up."
"That's not true," she protested, but we could all hear the lie.
"Ten thousand dollars you've taken," I said. "Probably more, but that's all we can prove."
YOU ARE READING
Izan and Mist
RomansaI secretly learned Spanish to surprise my boyfriend. Instead, I was the one who got the surprise when his family and friends began mocking me when he told them he was going to marry me. Then they got a surprise when I spoke to them...in Spanish. Now...
