Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and rode the bus down to the reception, because the firm’s partners were flying in for it and because my name had been on that guest list since January.
I did not go there to embarrass a man in front of his bosses. I went because twenty-nine years is a long time and I wanted my night crew to see me walk in the front door.
What I had in my coat pocket was a printout from Halima in the building office.
After seven at night those elevators do not go anywhere without a card. That is how the building has run since they redid the lobby in 2016. You tap, you press, and the controller writes down the card number, the floor you asked for, and the second you asked for it.
The money came off a desk on twenty-two, and the facilities manager put the window at 9:00 to 10:30, and he said it in front of the whole crew like he was on television.
My card that night: floor 9 at 8:41, floor 11 at 9:26, floor 14 at 10:02, lobby at 10:51.
My card has never once been on twenty-two after seven o’clock in nine years, because twenty-two is a law office with its own contract and its own person, and I have never had cause to go up there at night in my life.
They gave me the crystal at the reception. Twenty-nine years, and the managing partner read out the paragraph about the people who keep this building beautiful while the rest of us are asleep, and the room stood up.
Then Halima asked whether she could add a document to the file while everyone was together.
She read my card history off that page. Floors and times, nothing else. Then she said that this man had been backed against the elevators on Tuesday and told to resign or ride down in handcuffs, and that the elevator log had been sitting in a system the facilities manager has a login for and had not opened.
The managing partner asked him to explain that in front of two hundred people, and he could not, and I did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would.
The seventy dollars turned up in the drawer of the desk it came off of, two weeks later, under a folder. Nobody ever took it. The man it belonged to had moved it himself and forgotten, and he wrote me a letter that I still have and that I will not be showing to anybody.
They asked me back with my years unbroken and a raise I did not ask for. I took it and worked eleven more months and retired in the fall with my pension whole.
The contract crew never came. The facilities manager was gone by June.
The crystal is on the shelf. That elevator printout is under it, folded twice, and it will be there as long as I am.