San Tomas woke before the sun did, or perhaps it never entirely slept. At four forty in the morning the desert air outside the Copperline Athletic Club was still cool enough to make Dolores Marenco grateful for the thin jacket over her uniform, and the sky above the low warehouse roofs on the east side of town was the deep, patient blue that came just before the light changed its mind. She unlocked the service door with the key she had carried for nine years, the one whose teeth had worn smooth in the exact places her thumb pressed, and she let herself into the building the way she always did, quietly, as if the place were asleep and she did not want to be the one who startled it.
Inside, the gym smelled of what it always smelled of at that hour, before the fans had done their work and before bodies warmed it into something else: mat cleaner, old leather, the faint copper tang that lived in the bones of the building from its first life as a warehouse for the copper company, and underneath all of that, the honest smell of effort that no amount of cleaning ever quite removed and that Dee, privately, had never wanted to remove. A gym that smelled of nothing would have worried her. It would have meant nobody was trying.
She hung her jacket on the hook behind the office door, the third hook, hers by long custom though no one had ever assigned it, and she stood for a moment in the doorway of the main room with the lights still off. The mats lay in their long blue and grey rectangles under the skylights, empty and orderly. The heavy bags hung motionless in their row, patient as cattle. The cage at the far end, which Simon Greer had installed two years earlier over Yusuf Adeyemi's theatrical objections, stood with its door latched and its canvas clean from the night before, because Dee had cleaned it. In a little while the room would fill with music and shouting and the particular theatre of young people testing themselves against each other. Now it belonged, in the way that early places belong to the people who open them, to her.
"Morning," she said to the room, softly, the way she said it every morning, not from superstition exactly, but from the belief that a place you worked in deserved a greeting, the same as a person.
Then she went to work.
There was a liturgy to it, and Dee kept it faithfully. First the locker rooms, because they were the worst and because she had learned long ago, in jobs and in everything else, that you did the worst thing first while your arms were fresh and your patience was unspent. She cleaned the showers with the brush, not the spray alone, because spray alone was a lie you told the tiles. She replaced what needed replacing, she noted on her little pad, in her small upright hand, that the second shower head was dripping again and that the bench by the lockers had worked a screw loose, and she fixed the bench herself with the screwdriver from her cart because reporting it would have taken three days and fixing it took four minutes. Then the office, quick and respectful, never opening a drawer, never reading a paper that lay face up if she could help it, because a cleaner's hands went everywhere and her eyes, Dee believed, should not. Then the main room, and the main room was the real work.
She swept before she mopped, which the young man who had held the job for one summer three years ago had never understood. He had mopped straight over the grit and spread it into a grey paste and called the floor done, and Dee had come in the morning after his last shift and stood looking at the smeared mats with a feeling she could only describe as sorrow. Grit was information. Grit told you where people had walked from outside without changing their shoes, where the tape from somebody's wrapped ankle had come loose, where the heavy bag had been dragged instead of carried. You read it, you removed it, and only then did you bring water to the floor.