The attention, however, did not have floors to do, and it followed her with the persistence of a debt collector who has been given the wrong address and holds the whole street responsible. Members who had nodded at her for three years as a feature of the building — the lady with the keys, the lady who could be asked about the boiler, the lady who had once, unforgettably, removed a live scorpion from the women's changing room with a dustpan and a jam jar and no change of expression — now stopped her in corridors to tell her that they had always known there was something about her. A heavyweight called Marcus, who trained at six in the morning and had in three years said perhaps nine words to her, eight of them sorry and one of them mop, appeared beside her while she was cleaning the mirrors and said, "My grandma did judo," and then stood there as if this were a complete contribution, which in a way it was. Two separate men offered to manage her. One of them had a card. Jenna Park took to walking with her to the bus stop after evening classes, not saying why, planting herself on the street side like a small bright fence.
And then, on the Tuesday, the flowers came.
They were from a sponsor. Simon carried them in himself, cradling the vase with the air of a man delivering a verdict, and set them on the front desk and turned the card toward her with a flourish. The card said, in handwriting that was not the handwriting of anyone who had seen the clip, TO OUR CHAMPION, and Simon, reading her face, said quickly, "Now, Dee. Now. Don't take that tone with a hydrangea. These people put the new heavy bags in the back room. These people have a supplement. These people are interested in Friday week." He turned both hands up. "I am caught, Dolores. A man in my position. On the one hand I have a regional champion whose ego has been — let's say dented, let's not say anything stronger in front of the flowers. On the other hand I have you, who the internet loves, and who cannot, if I may say this with respect, be dented, because you do not appear to have an ego in the building. Do you know what you are, from a business point of view?"
"I clean here," Dee said.
"You are a story," Simon said, with genuine sorrow, "and I am a man with a mortgage on a story factory. The sponsors want a rematch, Dee. A proper one. An exhibition, full rules, announced, ticketed, Sam refereeing, doctor at the mat, the whole — they used the word event. Blake wants it. Eddie is out there right now telling the radio it was the shoes. The Herald wants to send a photographer. And everybody, everybody in this whole building, is waiting for me to come out of this office and tell them what you said." He looked at the flowers. "They're nice flowers. I don't even like flowers and I can tell they're nice flowers."
"I said I'd do a demonstration," Dee said. "I did a demonstration. The demonstration is done."
"That's what I told them you'd say," Simon said, brightening. "Word for word, that's what I said. She'll say the demonstration is done, I said. And they said, ask her again on Thursday."
That night she came in at ten for the shift she had worked for three years, and the building, emptied of its audience, was the building she knew. She let herself in with the big key. She turned off the alarm with the code. She stood for a moment in the dark reception, where the flowers stood too, drinking their water in the gloom like a delegation, and she put her coat on the hook and her bag under the desk and got the trolley out of the cupboard, and the ordinary sequence of it — sprays, cloths, the blue bucket, the mop with the head she had replaced herself in August — settled over her like weather she had chosen. This was the part nobody filmed. She cleaned the men's changing room first because it was the worst and she liked to get a worst thing done while she still had her strength. She cleaned the mirrors without looking at her own face in them for longer than the work required. She did the mats last, walking them in the long lanes with the mop, the way she had walked them on the night she was hired, when Sam Whitaker, showing her round, had said, without knowing he was saying anything, she's a good mat, this one, she forgives you if you land right.