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

Part 3: The Aftermath

The press came Monday.

I didn’t talk to them. I told Danny I didn’t want to be the story, and he understood, and his office released a statement that mentioned “a cooperating witness” and nothing else. The Charlotte Observer ran a piece on Tuesday about the SEC action against Whitfield, Marsh & Klein and about Marcus’s arrest, and my name wasn’t in it. That was how I wanted it.

But the firm knew.

Sarah Klein called me Wednesday morning. I was in my kitchen in my robe.

“Delores, I need you to come in. Not to clean. To talk.”

“Sarah, I don’t think I can come back to that building.”

“Come to my house.”

She lived in Myers Park in a brick colonial with a magnolia in the front yard. I’d never been inside a house that big without a mop in my hand. She met me at the door in jeans and a sweatshirt that said WAKE FOREST LAW, and I looked at the sweatshirt and thought, oh. Of course. That’s how she knew to trust Danny’s badge on sight.

She poured coffee. Real coffee, not office coffee.

“How long did you know?”

“About Marcus?”

“About all of it.”

I told her. From the phone call in October. From the six weeks of listening. I didn’t tell her about the ring in the ceramic dish in 2011, or about the divorce papers, or about any of the small things I’d carried for twenty years. Those weren’t crimes. Those were just a man’s life, and I wasn’t in the business of selling a man’s life.

She listened without interrupting.

When I finished, she said, “I want to offer you a job.”

“Sarah.”

“Hear me out.”

“Sarah, I’m fifty-eight years old. My knees are shot. I don’t have a college degree. I don’t know what job you think, “

“Head of facilities.”

I stopped.

“We have twenty-two people on the cleaning and maintenance staff across three floors,” she said. “Right now they report to a vendor in Raleigh who bills us four hundred thousand dollars a year and doesn’t know any of their names. You know all of their names. I’ve watched you know them for twenty years. I want to bring it in-house and I want you to run it.”

I set the coffee down.

“Why.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“Because I should have known your son’s name before Friday night. Because I’ve walked past you for twenty years and asked about your knees maybe six times. Because you’re the reason my firm still exists, and I’m the reason nobody in it knew who you were, and I can’t fix twenty years but I can fix the next ten if you’ll let me.”

I didn’t cry. I don’t cry in front of people I work for. That’s a rule I made a long time ago.

But my hands did that shaking thing again, and this time I didn’t put them in my pockets.

“I need to think about it.”

“Take a week.”

“I need two.”

“Take two.”

I stood up to leave. At the door, she said, “Delores. The salary would be ninety-two thousand. With benefits. And four weeks of paid leave.”

I had cleaned that firm’s offices for twenty years for twenty-nine thousand dollars a year with no vacation.

I did not trust the number. I did not trust the sweatshirt or the coffee or the magnolia tree.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

I drove home. I sat in my driveway for twenty minutes with the engine off before I could make myself go inside.

That night, Danny called from D.C.

“Mom, she called me.”

“Who did.”

“Sarah Klein. She wanted to know if I thought you’d take the job.”

“What did you tell her.”

He was quiet. Then he said, “I told her I couldn’t answer that for you. But I told her something else.”

“What.”

“I told her that in 2007 you worked a double at the firm and another cleaning job at a dentist’s office in Matthews so you could pay my Wake Forest deposit. And I told her that if she was offering you this job because she felt guilty, you’d say no, and if she was offering it because she’d actually thought about who was competent to do it, you might say yes. And I told her she should think hard about which one it was before you called her back.”

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark.

“Danny.”

“Yeah, Ma.”

“When did you get so smart.”

He laughed. “Wake Forest deposit, 2007.”

I laughed too. First time all week.

—