Halfway down the third lane her phone rang in her apron pocket, and it was Carla.
Carla Marenco was twenty-four and a nurse at St. Francis on the other side of San Tomas, and she had her grandmother's impatience with nonsense and her mother's habit of telephoning instead of texting when a thing mattered, so that a ringing phone from Carla had always meant pay attention. Dee leaned the mop against her shoulder and answered with floury, chemical hands.
"Mom," Carla said. "Are you sitting down?"
"I'm standing on a mat," Dee said. "I've been standing on it all night."
"One of the residents showed me a video," Carla said. "In the break room. On his phone. Dr. Anand held the phone. There were four of us. Mom. There were four of us and a consultant anaesthetist watching a video of you throw a professional fighter over your hip and armbar him, and Dr. Anand said, and I quote, because I will remember this on my deathbed, Dr. Anand said, 'Isn't that your mother, Carla?'"
"It was a demonstration," Dee said.
"Seven seconds, Mom."
"It was his entry. He came in too low and too hard. If he'd come in properly I'd have spent the whole round showing how to fall down safely, which was the demonstration I agreed to."
There was a silence in which Dee could hear the hospital behind her daughter, a trolley, a voice reading numbers, the soft institutional weather of the place Carla had chosen the way Dee had once chosen halls and flags. "Are you hurt?" Carla asked, at last, in a different voice.
"No, baby. No. He tapped clean, I let go clean, Sam checked him over. Nobody's hurt. His pride has a sprain."
"And you?"
"I'm mopping," Dee said, and heard herself say it, and laughed, unexpectedly, alone on the mat at half past eleven at night, because it was true in every way she knew how to mean it. "I'm mopping, Carla. That's where I am with the whole thing. The internet has had me all day and now I'm mopping."
"You sound," Carla said, carefully, "like a woman whose life is being discussed at a nursing station. Mr. Whitaker on four — no relation — Mr. Whitaker said you should get an agent."
"Two men already offered. One had a card."
"Mom."
"I said no to both of them," Dee said. "I said no to the newspaper. I said no to the flowers, though the flowers didn't ask me anything, they're just standing there getting on with it, which is more than I can say for the rest of the building. Blake's telling everyone his foot slipped. On a mat I mopped, Carla. I mopped it at four o'clock. There was nothing on that mat but mat."
"I know," Carla said. "I told Dr. Anand. I said my mother would be more offended about the mat than about anything." A pause. "He's going to ask for it again, isn't he. Officially. Men like that can't leave it at a mat."
"He already has," Dee said. "Through Simon, and Simon through the flowers. A proper exhibition. Ticketed. His coach is telling the radio it was the shoes."
"He wasn't wearing shoes," Carla said, who had watched the clip, evidently, more than once, and with attention.
"No," Dee said. "No, he wasn't."
The demand, when it came formally, came on the Thursday Simon had predicted, and it came, as these things now did, in the office, with the door, this time, closed. Blake sat in the visitor's chair in a clean tracksuit and did not grin at anything. His arm was unmarked. He had, Dee noticed, the stillness of a man who has rehearsed a speech in a car, and Eddie stood behind him and let him give it, which told her more about the state of both of them than the speech did.