The Billionaire Janitor Is Back! novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Terms

In the cottage kitchen the janitor sets his own terms, including one that buys nothing from her; at the county clerk he signs his full name, and the clerk asks if he's like the jets.

He heard me out in the cottage kitchen, with the light over the stove on and a pot of coffee between us.

The caretaker's cottage was one room and a bath, with a made bed in the corner, a shelf of paperbacks and nothing on the walls.

I had never been inside it.

In nineteen months I had never asked.

"Say the rest slowly," Mal said.

"Section four says settled household," I said.

"Wendell reads that as married. If I'm married by December twelfth, he has nothing."

"And you picked me."

"You live on the grounds. You don't gossip. You've never once called me ma'am to be polite."

"I call you ma'am constantly."

"You do it to be kind. It's different."

He almost smiled.

He sat back and the old chair complained.

He looked at my cardigan, my pencil and the white streak at my temple.

"What does it cost you?" he said.

"My pride. A year of my life. Whatever the town says."

"What does it cost me?"

"Nothing. That's the point of asking you. I'll pay you."

"No."

"I'll pay you fairly."

"No. Not one cent from you, and not one from me."

He turned his mug a quarter turn on the table.

"I have terms, Ms. Marsden."

I pulled a sheet of school letterhead out of my bag and clicked my pen.

"Go on."

"One. I keep my job. I'm not going to stop doing my work because a man in a quarter-zip says so."

I wrote it down.

"Two. Twelve months, then we undo it, quietly, with no blame on either side."

"Agreed."

"Three. I move into the lodge, because the board has to see a household. I don't touch your things."

"Agreed."

"Four."

He paused.

"Every night, we each tell the other one true thing."

I looked up.

"That's an odd term."

"If I'm going to lie to a whole town about us, I'd like to be honest with one person."

I felt that in my ribs, and I didn't know why.

"Fine. True thing every night. Anything else?"

"One more."

He looked at the table.

"This buys nothing from you but a signature."

"If either of us ever puts a hand on the other, it won't be because a piece of paper said so."

Heat climbed my neck.

"I wasn't offering that."

"I know. I'm saying it anyway."

"You're a very strange janitor."

"So I've heard."

I wrote it down in my neatest hand and underlined it.

The back door opened, and cold air came in with Ruthanne Yardley, who had run the front office for thirty-one years and wasn't winded.

She held a butterscotch in each hand.

"The whole gym is saying you proposed to the custodian," she said.

"I came to see if it was true."

"It's true," I said.

"Oh, good." She sat down. "Who's witnessing?"

Mal took the pen from me and signed the bottom of the sheet in square, careful capitals, one name only.

I signed under him.

Ruthanne wrote her name, handed us each a butterscotch, and said, "I've been waiting nine years for you to do one reckless thing, Edie."

"I've done one."

"Marry the right man," she said, "and it won't be reckless."

I let that go.

I paid him a dollar, because he refused to take more.

It was a crumpled bill from my coat pocket.

He folded it once and put it in his chest pocket, beside something else I couldn't see.

The county clerk's office opened at nine on Monday.

It had a fake ficus and a window with a brass slot.

Mal wore his good flannel shirt and had trimmed his beard into line.

He carried himself with rigid formality.

I filled out my half of the form with my pen from the school.

He filled out his without hesitating.

I didn't watch his hand.

I watched the clerk.

The clerk was a tired woman with reading glasses on her head, and she read the form aloud in a monotone.

"Edith Marsden. Malachi Thorsby."

She stopped.

"Thorsby?" she said. "Like the jets?"

Mal's pen didn't move.

"It's a common name in Ohio."

"Huh. There's a guy on the news, same name, with a company."

She shrugged.

"He's richer than you, I guess."

"Much," Mal said.

The clerk stamped the form.

I said nothing.

I had practiced saying nothing for eight months, and I was good at it.

We walked out into the cold morning, and I stopped at the top of the steps, because he was holding out his hand.

In his palm lay a thin gold band, worn smooth.

"It was my mother's," he said.

"She'd have liked you to have it for the day."

I took it.

It fit.

"Don't lose it," he said.

"I'm not buying you another."

"You're not buying me anything."

"That's right."

I looked up from the ring, ready to laugh.

Wendell was leaning on the hood of his silver truck at the bottom of the steps, with his lawyer beside him and his arms folded.

He had been waiting a while.

He looked at the ring, then at Mal's boots, and his mouth curled.

"Edie," he said pleasantly.

"I'm told a household has to be seen to be believed."

"Believe whatever you like."

"Nine o'clock tonight, then," Wendell said.

"The board is entitled to inspect."

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