I Cleaned Their Offices for 20 Years. At the Christmas Party, I Fired the CEO.
Part 4: Marta
Her name was Marta Delgado. She had cleaned Halberd & Cross from 1999 to 2004, the five years before me. She had left because her back went out. She was now seventy-two, and she lived in a duplex in KCK with her sister, and she had almost not answered the door when I knocked because she thought I was from the church again.
I had found her through the cleaning company, ServiClean. Sheila had made the call. Sheila had also, in the four months since the Christmas party, become a person I talked to on the phone every couple of weeks, which I had not seen coming.
Marta’s kitchen smelled like coffee and the good kind of soap. She sat me down at a small yellow table and she poured me a cup without asking, and we spoke in a mix of her English and my three semesters of high school Spanish from 1974, and it worked well enough.
“You worked for Halberd.”
“After you. I started in 2004.”
She nodded slowly. She had a wide, tired face, and hands that were bigger than mine, knuckles swollen from arthritis or from work or from both.
“He called me Marta,” I said. “The whole time. Twenty years.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she laughed. It was a real one, the kind that came from her stomach, and it startled me.
“He called me Rosa,” she said.
I looked at her.
“Rosa was the woman before me. He never learned. Any of us.”
We sat with that.
“I saw in the paper,” she said. “What you did.”
“I didn’t do very much.”
“You did enough.”
I did not know what to say. I looked at my coffee. It was very good coffee.
“I have something to ask you,” I said.
“Okay.”
“There is going to be money. From the case. I don’t want all of it.”
Her face did not change.
“How much.”
“I don’t know yet. A lot. More than I need.”
“And you want to give me some.”
“Yes.”
She looked at me for a long time. Longer than was comfortable. I started to think I had said the wrong thing, that I had insulted her, that I had walked into her kitchen with a checkbook like some Lady Bountiful and she was going to tell me to get out.
Then she said, “Why.”
I thought about it.
“Because he called us both the wrong name,” I said. “And because you left because your back went out, and I stayed because Rick died and I needed the insurance, and neither one of those is a reason a person should have to keep cleaning up after a man like that.”
She nodded, slowly. She drank her coffee. She set it down.
“Okay,” she said. “But not all of it.”
“I wasn’t going to give you all of it.”
“How much.”
“Some. I don’t know. Enough that if your back goes out again you don’t have to worry about it.”
She looked at her hands for a while.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Thank you, Diane.”
“Thank you, Marta.”
We sat.
“I want to ask you something,” she said.
“Okay.”
“When you took the papers. Were you scared.”
I thought about it.
“Every day.”
“For five years.”
“For five years.”
She reached across the table and put her hand on top of mine. Her hand was warm and heavy and it stayed there.
“Mija,” she said, “you did a brave thing.”
I have not cried much in my life. I did not cry when Rick died, not in front of anyone. I did not cry when the FBI walked Marcus Halberd out through the catering entrance. I did not cry when Peter Halston told me the check was going to be seven figures.
I cried in Marta Delgado’s kitchen. Not a lot. Enough.
She did not say anything. She just kept her hand on mine and let me do it.
Emma got married that spring. Not to anybody dramatic, just to Ben, who she’d been with for four years and who taught eighth grade math and made her laugh. The wedding was small, at a park in Loose Park in May, and I wore a blue dress I’d bought at Dillard’s and Marta came, in a purple dress and a hat, and sat next to Sheila from facilities, who had also come, and the two of them talked the whole ceremony about their grandchildren.
The check from the SEC came in July. I will not tell you the number. I will tell you it was more than I had made in forty years of work combined, and that I understood, holding it in my hand at the kitchen table, why Emma had told me not to decide before I had it.
I gave some to Marta. I gave some to Emma and Ben, for a down payment on a house that was not falling apart. I gave a large piece to the retired firefighters’ pension fund in Ohio, which Peter Halston said was legally strange but not prohibited, and which one of the firefighters called me about, a man named Ed, who had been trying to work out how to thank me and instead ended up crying on the phone for ten minutes while I said it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
I kept enough to fix the dishwasher, and the linoleum, and the cabinets. I kept enough that I would not have to think about money again for the rest of my life.
I did not go back to work.
I did go back to the Halberd & Cross building. Once. In August. The firm was gone by then, the offices were being subleased by three different companies, and the big glass logo in the lobby had been taken down and replaced with a temporary sign that said SUITE DIRECTORY.
I walked in through the front door for the first time in twenty years. Nobody stopped me. Nobody looked at me. I was a sixty-five-year-old woman in a blue dress, and I was invisible in the exact way I had always been invisible in that building, and it was, this time, a relief.
I took the elevator to fourteen. I don’t know why. I just wanted to see it.
The offices were empty. The carpet had been pulled up. Someone was renovating. There was a young man in a hard hat standing near where Marcus’s office used to be, looking at a clipboard, and he glanced up when the elevator doors opened.
“Ma’am. This floor’s under construction. You’re not supposed to.”
“I know,” I said. “I used to work here. I just wanted to look.”
He softened. He was maybe twenty-five. He had a kind face.
“You worked for Halberd?”
“I cleaned the offices. For twenty years.”
He was quiet for a second.
“Wait,” he said. “Are you.”
“Yes.”
He set the clipboard down. He walked over. He held out his hand.
“Ma’am,” he said. “It’s an honor.”
I shook his hand. I did not know what to say. I had not expected that. I had come up here to look at an empty room and I had gotten, instead, a young man in a hard hat calling me ma’am like I was somebody.
“What’s your name,” I said.
“Danny.”
“Danny. It’s nice to meet you.”
“You too, ma’am.”
I looked past him, at the space where Marcus’s office had been. Just drywall now. Just studs. No mahogany desk, no leather chair, no trash can I had emptied every weeknight for twelve years. Just a room.
I stood there for a minute. Danny went back to his clipboard, quietly, giving me the space.
I did not feel triumph. I want to be honest about that. I did not feel the big clean thing the movies would have given me.
What I felt was that a woman named Marta Delgado had cleaned this office before me, and a woman named Rosa had cleaned it before her, and there had probably been women before Rosa too, going back to whenever the building had gone up. And that Marcus Halberd had not known any of our names. And that this did not, in the end, matter to the drywall, or to the studs, or to Danny in his hard hat, or to the retired firefighter named Ed in Ohio who had cried on the phone with me in July.
It mattered to me. That was the whole thing. It had mattered to me for twenty years, and I had done something about it, and now I was standing in an empty room on the fourteenth floor of a building that no longer belonged to the man who had called me the wrong name, and I was sixty-five years old, and I was going home.
I took the elevator down.
On my way out through the lobby, I passed the temporary suite directory sign. I stopped and I looked at it. Halberd & Cross was not on it. Nowhere. Just three new companies, and a placeholder that said SUITE 1401, AVAILABLE.
I walked out to my car. It was hot. August in Kansas City. The asphalt shimmered.
I sat in the driver’s seat for a minute before I turned the key. I thought about Rick. I thought about how he would have said something dry and funny about all of this, and I would have laughed, and he would have looked pleased with himself the way he always did when he made me laugh.
I did not have him to say it to. I had, instead, the empty passenger seat, and the sun on the dashboard, and a whole afternoon ahead of me with nothing in it that I had to do.
I started the car.
I drove home.