Mr Weinberg stood up slowly, set his napkin on the table, and looked at Brett, who had invited his own boss to Hanukkah dinner to impress him.
Then Mr Weinberg told the table where he was in the winter of 2022.
He was alone in his office on the thirty-eighth floor of a building on Wacker Drive, after everyone had gone home, when a blood clot dropped him to the carpet where no one could see him. He could not reach the phone. He could not call out. He lay on the floor of a glass tower and understood that he was going to die there, and that no one would find him until morning.
And then, forty stories up in the January wind off the lake, a man on a scaffold saw him through the glass. That man called 911, stayed on the line, and kept pointing and pounding on the window so the paramedics could find the right floor and the right office in a dark building. They reached Mr Weinberg with minutes to spare.
He never got to thank the window washer. The company would not give out a name. For two years he wondered who the man on the glass had been.
It was Sam.
Some of us look out the windows, Brett had said, and some of us wash them. He did not know one of those men had saved his own bosss life.
Mr Weinberg crossed the room and shook my brothers hand with both of his, and he did not let go for a long time. He said that he had come to this dinner as a favor to an employee, and that he was leaving it having finally met the man he owed his life to.
Brett, the highest paid man at the table, sat holding his wine with nothing to say. His boss spent the rest of the evening talking to the squeegee man, not to him.
Sam just spun his dreidel and said, I am glad you made it, Mr Weinberg. Then he wished everyone a happy Hanukkah and asked somebody to pass the latkes.