I Cleaned Their Offices for 20 Years. At the Christmas Party, I Fired the CEO.

Part 4: The Woman in the Coveralls

The story got out, of course.

By Monday morning it was in the Plain Dealer. By Monday afternoon it was on national news. By Wednesday, there were reporters outside my building, and Hannah’s firm had put a security guard at their lobby, and I was hiding in my daughter’s spare bedroom eating leftover Thai food and not answering my phone.

They called me the Cleaning Lady Who Took Down Prescott.

I hated that. Not the cleaning lady part. The Prescott part. Because it wasn’t Prescott I had taken down. Prescott had taken down Prescott. I had just made a phone call to my daughter at three in the morning.

I said this on the one interview I agreed to, a local morning show, because Priya said it would be good for the case if the public saw me as a person and not a headline. The interviewer, a woman with very white teeth, asked me what I felt when the handcuffs went on.

I thought about it.

“Nothing,” I said.

She waited for more.

“I thought I would feel something,” I said. “I thought I would feel victory or anger or, I don’t know, satisfaction. But when the cuffs went on, I just felt tired. Twenty years of tired, all at once.”

She nodded like she understood. I don’t think she did.

“And what will you do now, Rina?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you keep cleaning?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“The office is closed,” I said. “The company is under receivership. I don’t have a job to go back to.”

“Have you thought about writing a book?”

“No.”

“A movie?”

“No.”

“What have you thought about.”

I looked at her.

“I’ve thought about Eleanor Voss,” I said.

The camera pulled in on my face. The interviewer waited.

“She’s ninety-one years old,” I said. “She lives in a memory care facility in Shaker Heights. She doesn’t know what year it is. She doesn’t know her son is dead. She doesn’t know her daughter-in-law was stealing from her. She won’t know if I take down Daniel Prescott or if I don’t. She won’t know if the money comes back or if it doesn’t. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

The interviewer opened her mouth.

“I didn’t do this for her,” I said. “I want to be clear about that. She won’t feel any different. I did this because I couldn’t stop doing it once I saw it. That’s not the same as being a hero.”

They cut to commercial.

Eleanor Voss’s real daughter was named Katherine. She lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and she had not seen her mother in four years because Marlene had told her the visits were “too disruptive” and had gradually cut her out of the family’s business affairs.

I wrote her the letter, with Hannah’s help, on the Saturday after the party. Priya read it before we sent it, and cleared it, and sent it.

Katherine called me the following Tuesday. She had already been contacted by the U.S. Attorney’s office. She was crying so hard I couldn’t understand her for the first minute.

When she could talk, she said, “You saved my mother’s estate.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“Katherine, I want to be careful. The estate may not be recoverable. A lot of the money is offshore. Priya says it’s going to take years.”

“I don’t care about the money.”

“Oh.”

“I care that I can visit my mother again.”

I sat with that for a second.

“You couldn’t visit her before?”

“Marlene told the facility I was estranged and unstable. There was a letter in the file. I found out about it last week. I’ve been trying to get in for two years.”

I closed my eyes.

“Rina.”

“Yes.”

“I’m driving down on Friday. I’m going to see her. I would like to buy you a cup of coffee, if you’ll let me.”

“Katherine.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t need thanks.”

“I know. That’s not why I’m asking.”

“Then why.”

She was quiet for a second.

“Because,” she said, “I want to know who you are. The woman who cleaned an office and remembered my name from a Christmas card. I would like to meet that woman.”

I met her on Friday. We had coffee at a diner off I-71. She was sixty-three years old, gray, tired, kind. She showed me a picture of her mother from before, a photograph of Eleanor Voss at seventy, at a garden party, laughing. I looked at that photograph for a long time.

Katherine watched me look.

“She was a schoolteacher,” Katherine said. “Third grade. For thirty-one years.”

“Where.”

“Right here in Cleveland. Denison Elementary.”

I set the photograph down.

“My daughter went to Denison Elementary.”

Katherine stared at me.

“When.”

“Ninety-eight to two thousand and four.”

Katherine put her hand over her mouth.

“My mother taught third grade at Denison until two thousand and one.”

We sat there in the diner. Neither of us said anything for a while.

Hannah’s third grade teacher had been a woman named Mrs. Voss. Hannah had adored her. Hannah still had a book Mrs. Voss had given her at the end of the year, a copy of *Bridge to Terabithia*, with an inscription on the inside cover: *For Hannah, who reads like she means it. Keep going. Mrs. V.*

The book was on Hannah’s shelf in her apartment. I had dusted it a hundred times.

I did not tell Katherine any of that at the diner. I couldn’t. I couldn’t get the words out.

I told her later. I told her a month later, when we knew each other better, when I had been to see Eleanor once, briefly, and had held her hand for ten minutes while she looked at a spot on the wall behind me. Katherine cried when I told her about the book. She said she wanted to see it.

Hannah brought it to her the next weekend.

Katherine held it and read the inscription and pressed it to her chest, and then she gave it back to Hannah, and said, “She would want you to keep it.”

That is not the ending.

The ending is smaller.

Six months after the Christmas party, in the middle of June, I was working my new job. I had gone back to cleaning, because that’s what I know how to do, but I was cleaning for a small firm downtown that Priya had connected me with, three nights a week instead of five, better pay, better hours. I could sleep in the same rhythm as normal humans for the first time in twenty years.

On a Thursday night in June, I was pushing my cart down the hallway of the fourteenth floor of a building on Euclid Avenue, and I passed a young woman in a lawyer’s suit, coming back from a late night at her desk.

She looked up from her phone. She looked at me. She said, “Good evening. How are you tonight?”

I stopped.

I said, “I’m well. Thank you for asking.”

She smiled. She kept walking.

She didn’t know who I was. She hadn’t seen the news, or she hadn’t connected the face, or she just didn’t care. She was just a young woman being polite to a woman in coveralls in an empty hallway at nine at night.

I stood there for a minute after she passed.

Then I pushed my cart to the next office, and I emptied the trash, and I wiped the ring off the desk.

There was still a lot of work to do.