The First Paycheque

Grace had done the calculation on the bus, on the back of a receipt, three times.

Thirty-seven and a half hours a week. Two weeks. Twenty-four dollars an hour. That was one thousand eight hundred dollars. It was the most money she had ever earned in two weeks in her life, and she already knew exactly what she was going to do with it: rent, groceries, a winter jacket for her son, and two hundred dollars sent home to her mother.

On Friday afternoon, the office manager at the medical clinic in Calgary where Grace worked as a receptionist handed out small envelopes. Grace went into the staff washroom, locked the door and opened hers with shaking fingers.

Net pay: $1,512.47

She read it again. She turned the paper over, as if the rest of the money might be on the back.

Almost three hundred dollars was missing.