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

Part 4: The Cart

The sale closed on the last day of March.

Northern Trust honored every clause of the severance package. Every employee below vice president got two years guaranteed. Sondra got promoted into a role in their Chicago office at almost double her old salary. Ruth Landry retired to Sedona and sent me a postcard with a picture of a red rock on it and the words Well done written on the back in her tiny paralegal handwriting.

Marcus and Alison moved to Florida. That is what I heard. I did not go looking for confirmation.

Douglas found out who sent the letter. It was not Marcus. It was Alison. She had done a Google search on my dead husband from her own laptop, on the family Wi-Fi, three days before the letter arrived. Douglas said we could press charges. I told him no. I told him Alison had probably had a harder twelve years than most people knew and I was not going to be the one who made year thirteen worse.

Douglas said, Diane, you are too soft for this business.

I said, Douglas, I am not in this business anymore.

The final walk-through of the twelfth-floor offices was on a Saturday in April. Northern Trust wanted the space cleared by Monday for their renovations. I did not have to be there. I went anyway.

The floor was empty. All the desks were gone. The chairs were gone. The framed photograph of old Mr. Halloway from 1987, the one that had hung in the lobby for thirty-six years, was in a cardboard box by the elevator, waiting to be shipped to his grandson in Wisconsin, the one who does not work in finance.

I walked through the whole floor.

I went into the conference room where Marcus had stood on the chair. I went into his old office. Someone had already taken the leather couch. The bare floor where it had been was cleaner than the rest of the carpet, a rectangle of dark green in a sea of faded green, and I stood there for a minute looking at it.

Then I went down to the sixth floor supply closet, and I got my cart.

I pushed it through every floor of that building one last time.

I did not clean anything. There was nothing left to clean. I just pushed the cart, floor by floor, in the elevator, out of the elevator, down the halls, past the empty offices, past the wall where they had already pulled down the Halloway & Prine sign and left the ghost of it in unfaded paint.

On the eighth floor, in the break room, I sat down at the table where I had drunk my tea for twenty years. I ate a granola bar. I looked out the window at the river.

Then I took the cart back down to the loading dock, and I left it there, and I walked out onto Wabash Avenue for the last time.

It was not snowing this time. It was one of those first warm days in April where the city smells like wet stone and hot dog carts.

I did not fly out to Denver in May.

Kevin’s graduation got moved because of a scheduling thing with the university, and by the time I had my ticket booked, my son called and said, Mom, actually, don’t come in May. Come in August. Stay through Christmas.

I said, Honey, that is four months.

He said, I know.

I said, Are you sure.

He said, Mom. Come.

So I went in August.

I have a room in their basement now. It is finished. There is a window that looks out at the mountains and a bed that Kevin helped his father assemble the week before I got there. My son had put a book on the nightstand. It was the book about the solar system that old Mr. Halloway had sent Kevin for the science fair in 2007. Kevin had kept it all these years. He had put it there for me.

I have not seen Colleen. My son has not asked about his father in a way that made me think he was going to. Maybe someday he will. Maybe he already has and he is not telling me. Some things you carry across a room and set down and do not pick back up again.

I did get one more letter, in September, forwarded from my old address in Bridgeport.

It was from Marcus.

It was two paragraphs. It said that he had been in a program in Boca Raton for four months. It said that he was writing to every person he had ever worked with to apologize for specific things he had said or done. He then listed six specific things he had said to me, or about me, in the previous four years. He got four of them right. He missed the worst one, the one about the cart, which I found darkly funny.

He said he was not asking for forgiveness. He said he understood I did not owe him a response. He said he wanted me to know that he had a daughter now, from his first marriage, who was starting to come around again, and that when she asked him what he did for work, he had told her the truth. He said his father had told him once, in the nursing home, that the best thing he ever did in his life was hire a woman named Diane the week after her husband died. He said he had not understood at the time. He said he thought he was starting to.

I read the letter twice.

I did not write back that day. I did not write back that week. My son asked me about it, once, when he saw it sitting on the kitchen counter, and I told him it was from an old boss, and he did not ask again.

In November, on a Sunday morning, I sat down at the desk in my basement room and I wrote three lines on a piece of paper.

Marcus. I got your letter. You forgot about the cart.

I signed it Diane.

I put it in an envelope. I put a stamp on it. I walked it out to the mailbox at the end of my son’s driveway in the cold Colorado morning, and I put it in, and I closed the little metal door, and I lifted the red flag.

Then I stood there for a minute, in my coat, looking down the empty street.

I have not heard back from him yet.

I don’t know if I will.

The mountains that morning were the color of wet concrete, and the sky above them was doing something soft and pink that I did not have a word for, and somewhere behind me in the house my son was making coffee, and I could hear him through the kitchen window, humming.

I stood there in the driveway a little longer than I needed to.

Then I went inside.