The Wages Were Still Due
The owners could leave their apartment company's cleaning bill unpaid. I still had to pay the people who cleaned it. Casper, winter 1988: three wages were due on Friday, and my customer's check had not arrived for the third month.
The client has not paid, but the crew still needs its wages.
I had taken the job in September. The building had three floors and enough vacant apartments to keep my crew busy. We washed the halls, scrubbed kitchens, and hauled out what departing tenants left behind. My workers took home their pay every week. The company that owned the building paid me by the month.
Its manager brought the contract to the front steps. I saw the letters LLC after the company's name. He said his investors had been waiting for a new IRS ruling about how a Wyoming company like theirs would be taxed. I was looking at the work ahead of us. I signed and sent my crew upstairs.
The first check came. The second came late. By the third month, the manager had stopped answering my calls. I went back to the building and found the front door locked. Through its glass I could see the clean stairs we had left the night before.
My lawyer read the contract with me. Only the LLC had promised to pay. None of its members had signed for the bill personally. The building was worth less than the bank's mortgage, he said, and the company's account was empty. He explained the September ruling too: a Wyoming LLC with the features the IRS had examined could be taxed as a partnership while its members remained outside ordinary company debts. It did not put those members behind my invoice.
I ran my cleaning business in my own name. My workers' wages were mine to pay, whatever happened to that invoice. I went home and took the bankbook from the drawer where my daughter kept her college letters.
She stood beside me as I counted bills into three pay envelopes. There was enough. When I closed the bankbook, she set her college catalog on the table beside the last envelope. Neither of us said when I would put the money back.