It was Oge who changed it. She hadn't meant to speak; she stood at the back with her hat in her hands. But when the room went quiet a third time she cleared her throat, and because hers had been the voice saying *goodnight, drive safe* to all of them for twenty-two years, they turned.
"Everybody's talking about what he wanted. Keep it, sell it. I read that letter. He didn't say keep it. He didn't say sell it. He said *let the floor decide.*" She looked around the ring. "That's the gift. Not the wood. The deciding. In twenty-two years nobody let the floor decide anything — not the schedule, not the uniform, not what time I walk my rounds. He's handing us one thing, one time, and saying: *you.* So whatever we do, we don't do it scared, and we don't do it because somebody upstairs needs it. We do it together. And then it's ours either way, even in Chicago." She put on her hat. "That's all. I'm going home to sleep."
Then Lucjan stepped out of the ring onto the open marble and unfolded a piece of brown wrapping paper from his coat pocket.
"I wrote some things. I am not good with talking. Benedek was worse." He put on his glasses. "One. It goes to the museum. Marisol is right, and the old woman with the broom" — he nodded up at the crown — "would give you all her pierogi before she gave a stick of wood. Two. The letter goes beside it in the gallery. The real one, not a copy in a drawer. Three. Our names beside it. Not *donated by the family.* The floor of Achterberg's. Four. It turns. It is a pyramid; it is supposed to turn. Five. Once a year, first Sunday of Advent, two people from the floor stand on the ledge and the tower goes up. On purpose. For everybody." He looked across the room at the tall windows, at Elliot. "Six. I take it apart and build a new drive. Not alone. With Benedek's grandson. Or I don't do it, and they can hire some boy with an Allen key."
Nadia laughed first, and then others, and something in the room broke open.
"Can we do that?" Ferdie asked. "Put conditions?"
"I don't know," Roz said. "I think we're allowed to ask." She looked at the eighty-four people around the pyramid, and then said the sentence that for three days had not been hers to say. "Everyone who agrees with Lucjan — would you stand with him?"
They were already standing; there were no chairs. So the ones who agreed walked forward, out of the ring and onto the marble beside Lucjan. The receiving crew. The tearoom. Housewares. Teodora's granddaughter wheeled her up, and the old woman said loudly, "Well, obviously." Ferdie stood where he was a long moment, hands in his vest pockets, then walked forward too, touching Marisol's shoulder as he passed. She covered his hand with hers.
Six people stayed back by the windows. Roz saw them and asked them nothing.
"You don't have to come," she told them across the room. "That's what deciding means."
One of them, a seamstress from Alterations, signed the paper anyway that afternoon, with a note beside her name: *I wanted it to stay. But I'm the floor too.*
They signed on a single long sheet of brown wrapping paper from the Shop, because Lucjan said that was what Benedek would have used. *We, the floor of Achterberg's.* Eighty-four names the first day. The sheet lay on Benedek's bench for three weeks, and people kept coming down to add theirs — porters from the seventies, an elevator operator's son, a woman who had wrapped gifts for one Christmas in 1992 and never forgotten it. By the fifteenth of January there were a hundred and twelve.
That was who the floor was. They had decided that, too.
Corinne Waldegg read the conditions on the twenty-eighth of December in her office over the Chicago River, while Roz sat across the desk trying not to look at the clock.
"The letter, fine. The names, fine; it'll be a long label. Raising the tower — my registrar will need to lie down, but it's the most interesting thing about the object, and I'd be a fool to hide it." She tapped the page. "*It turns.* Sixty-seven-year-old linden. Moving parts wear."