I Was the Janitor Everyone Ignored for 19 Years, Until the Board Meeting About the Missing $4.2 Million

Part 4: Six Months

Six months later, I stood in a room I had never been in before.

It was the front porch of a house on Bramble Street, but not the one I’d rented. Four doors down. A small two-story with a covered porch and a maple in the front yard, and Rowan had spotted the FOR SALE sign in December, on the drive back to Ann Arbor after Christmas.

“Grandma. Look.”

“I see it.”

“Grandma.”

I had bought the house in cash in February. That still didn’t feel like a sentence a person could say.

The settlement money had come in three tranches. Diane had walked me through what to do with each one. She was, it turned out, the kind of person who kept doing favors for you after the professional reason had ended. We had lunch every couple of months now, at a diner halfway between her office and my house.

Rowan was inside, painting the guest room, which was going to be her room when she came home in the summers. She’d argued with me about it. She’d said, “Grandma, you don’t need to make me a room, I’m a grown-up.”

I had said, “Baby, I have wanted to make you a room since you were four years old. Let me.”

She’d let me.

I heard a car door.

Peter Salmon was walking up my new front walkway. I hadn’t seen him since October. He’d left three more voicemails over the winter. I had, eventually, listened to them. I had not called back.

Now here he was, at my house, in a wool coat, holding a small potted plant.

I opened the door before he knocked.

“Mr. Salmon.”

“Eleanor.”

“I got your messages.”

“I figured.”

He held out the plant. A little Christmas cactus in a red pot, out of season and looking confused.

“I know it’s late,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you’d want,”

“I’ll take the plant.”

I took the plant. I did not invite him in.

He stood on the porch, hands in his coat pockets, and looked at me.

“The company is going to be all right,” he said. “I don’t know if anyone’s told you. We’re restructured. Insurance covered most of the loss. We didn’t have to lay anyone off.”

“That’s good.”

“Richard took a plea. Eighteen months.”

“I read about it.”

“Of course you did.”

He was working up to something. I let him work.

“I wanted to say,”

He stopped.

I waited.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this for six months,” he said. “And every version of it sounds like an excuse.”

“Then don’t say it.”

He looked at me.

“I’m not going to tell you I’m sorry I didn’t see you,” I said. “Because I don’t need that from you. I saw myself. My granddaughter saw me. My grandson saw me. That was enough.”

He nodded slowly.

“I’d like it,” he said, “if it were more than that. Someday. Not today. I don’t expect today.”

I thought about that.

I thought about the four times in nineteen years he’d said good morning. And I thought about how, sitting at that boardroom table in October, he was the only one who’d said my name.

“Come back in the fall,” I said. “There’s a diner on Main Street. Betty’s. I’ll buy you coffee.”

“You’ll buy me coffee.”

“I can afford it now.”

He laughed. It was a small, surprised laugh, and I let myself smile a little, because six months is a long time and I was tired of holding a grudge like a full cart up a ramp.

“I’ll see you in the fall, Eleanor.”

“Goodbye, Peter.”

He walked back to his car.

I stood on the porch with the Christmas cactus.

Rowan came up behind me, paint on her cheek, and looked at the retreating car.

“Who was that?”

“A man who used to work in a building where I used to work.”

She squinted at me.

“Grandma.”

“What.”

“That sounds like you’re being coy.”

“I’m sixty-three years old, baby. I’ve earned the right to be coy.”

She snorted. She took the cactus from me and turned it in her hand.

“This is a weird plant to bring someone in April.”

“He’s a weird man.”

“You gonna keep it?”

I looked at the little red pot.

“For now,” I said.

We went inside. Rowan went back to her paint roller. I sat down at my kitchen table, my own kitchen table, in my own house, and I looked out the window at the maple tree in the front yard, which had not yet leafed out but was thinking about it.

The green notebook was in a drawer in this kitchen now. I had asked Diane if I could have it back after the trial ended, and she’d said yes, and one afternoon a manila envelope had shown up in my mailbox with the notebook inside and a Post-it note that said *Yours. -DK*.

I hadn’t opened it since.

I didn’t need to.

I got up and put the Christmas cactus on the windowsill, where it would get the afternoon light, and I stood there for a minute looking at it. It was a small thing. It was a strange thing. It was the kind of thing that might live or might not, depending on how much attention it got.

Upstairs, Rowan was singing to herself while she painted.

I could hear her through the ceiling.

I stayed at the window a while longer, then I went to start dinner.