At forty-eight, Dee's body had opinions about the work that it had not had at thirty, and she had learned to negotiate with it rather than argue. Her left shoulder woke stiff most mornings and loosened as she moved, an old weather system living in the joint. Her knees preferred that she lift the mop bucket by the handle with both hands and carry it close, and she did. None of this slowed her in any way that mattered. She had simply learned where her strength actually lived, which, she reflected sometimes, wringing the mop out with a practised twist that used her hips and not just her arms, was more than could be said for half the fighters who would arrive at six with their headphones on and their hoods up, still believing that strength was a thing that lived only in the obvious places.
The mop moved in long, overlapping arcs. Dee worked backwards, as you must, so that you never step on what you have cleaned, and she thought, as she often thought at this hour and no other, that there were worse philosophies for a life than that: know where you have been, leave it cleaner than you found it, and do not walk back through your own wet work just because the door happens to be behind you.
By five fifteen the mats were done and drying in pale lanes, the bags had been wiped down, and the whiteboard by the office had been cleaned of yesterday's combinations and left blank for Yusuf's handwriting, which was terrible, and for Simon's, which was worse. Dee emptied the bucket at the deep sink, rinsed it twice, and set her cart in its place by the store room, everything in order: sprays in their row, cloths folded, brush rinsed and upright. Order was not tidiness, she had tried to explain once to Carla, who had laughed and accused her of making housework sound like religion. Order was knowing, without looking, where a thing would be when you needed it in the dark.
She made coffee in the office machine, which she had descaled the week before without being asked, and she poured the first cup for herself and drank it standing at the window that looked out over the yard, watching the sky decide. San Tomas was not a beautiful town in the way the tourist towns up north were beautiful, and Dee loved it without illusion. It was a working town of low roofs and wide streets, of a copper history that had made some families rich two generations ago and then left, of grandmothers who still cooked for streets rather than households. Her own grandmother had cleaned the courthouse in this town for thirty-one years and had been, in Dee's mother's phrase, invisible in two languages. Dee thought about her sometimes at this hour, another woman with a cart in an empty building, and felt the old complicated pride settle, as it always did, somewhere under her ribs.
The first fighters arrived at five forty, as they always did, in a loose, yawning knot: two wrestlers from the state college programme who trained before lectures, a heavyweight named Tomasino who was gentle in every place except the cage, and a young woman with a shaved stripe in her hair whose name, Dee knew, was Priya, though Priya had never learned Dee's. They nodded in her general direction, the way you nod at a piece of furniture that has always been in a room, and went past her to the mats she had cleaned, dropping their bags exactly where she had asked, by sign and once aloud, that bags not be dropped. She moved one bag to the bench herself, without comment. It was not resentment she felt, exactly. Resentment was a waste of a clean morning. It was more like the old, familiar knowledge that people saw the work and not the worker, and that this had been true in every building she had ever cleaned, and that she had made her peace with it on terms that were hers and not theirs.
Jenna Park arrived at five fifty, as she always did, running, because Jenna Park arrived everywhere running, as if life were a thing she was perpetually and cheerfully late for. She was twenty-six, a featherweight with quick hands and a quicker conscience, and she was the only fighter in the club who had ever asked Dee a question about herself and then stayed in the room for the whole answer.
"Dee. Dee, tell me I did not leave my wraps in the locker room again."
"You left your wraps in the locker room again," Dee said. "Third locker. I put them on top so the next person didn't inherit them."
"You are a saint and a prophet." Jenna jogged backwards towards the locker room, pointing at her with both hands. "One day they're going to put your name on this building."