Part Five: The Work She Did
After the croissant, she asked if she could clean.
He said she could, which he understood as he said it was an unusual thing to say, but the circumstances were unusual and her desire to do the thing she had come to do was clearly important to her.
She cleaned the window behind his desk.
She was not tall enough to reach the upper portion without the step stool that she found in the supply closet — she found the supply closet herself, which meant she had asked Marguerite, or had simply explored until she found it, or both — and she was thorough in the way that suggested Sofia had taught her well. She sprayed the glass. She wiped it in the overlapping circular motions that left no streaks. She stepped back and examined her work with the critical eye of someone applying a standard.
“That’s good,” she said, to herself more than to him.
He had returned to work — or to what work looked like in the presence of a five-year-old cleaning the window behind him. He found that he was not, in fact, working. He was watching her in the reflection of the window she had cleaned, watching the small methodical figure with the cloth that was slightly too large for her hand.
She hummed while she worked. He did not recognize the song.
“What are you humming?” he asked.
She stopped. “A song my mum sings.” She paused. “She sings it when she cleans. She says it makes the time go faster.”
“Does it?”
She considered this with genuine seriousness. “I don’t know. It makes things less quiet.”
He looked at her.
“Less quiet is good?” he said.
“When you’re doing something alone,” she said.
He looked at his office — the glass walls, the clean lines, the forty-five minutes every morning that belonged entirely to him. The city twenty-eight floors down, reduced to pattern.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is.”
She returned to the window, and resumed the song, and he sat in his chair and did not work and listened to her hum.
