Tomas wrote for a long time. His ears had gone red. When he looked up, his second question was better, and she answered it properly, and the third one was better still, and by the end of the hour he had stopped saying janitor except when he was quoting other people, and she had told him about balance and about falling, and about why she had agreed to Saturday at all, which was the scholarship fund and the contracts and the clause about the medical checks, and not, as three outlets had already decided, revenge. He asked if she was angry at Blake Rennert. She considered it honestly, the way she considered everything, with the coffee going cold between her hands.
No, she said. I was angry at being laughed at in a room I clean. That is not the same man, exactly. He laughed, and that was his part, and he will carry it or he will not. I am not carrying it for him. I have enough to carry. I know what is in my hands.
That quote ran on Wednesday, under a headline she would not have chosen, and her telephone began again before she had finished reading it, because the clip of her saying it, filmed over Tomas's shoulder by the cafe's own security camera and leaked by somebody she chose not to hunt, had travelled further by breakfast than the article itself. Jenna Park sent it to her with a row of exclamation marks. Yusuf sent it to her with no comment at all, which from Yusuf was applause. Carla called during her break at the hospital, with the sounds of a ward behind her, trolleys and a distant call bell, and said, Mom, you are trending, and Dee said, I am making soup, which was also true, and Carla laughed in a way that sounded, to a mother's ear, like relief wearing a disguise.
Beneath the noise, the week did its real work quietly, the way Dee liked work done. On Wednesday afternoon, in Simon Greer's office, with the blinds half down against the white glare of the parking lot, four contracts were signed on a desk that Dee had dusted at midnight the night before. She was not in the room for the signing. She had asked not to be. It was not her signature that mattered on those pages and she did not want the men and women who cleaned the Copperline to have to be grateful in her direction for something that should simply have been theirs. But she knew what was in them, because she had written the list herself, in pencil, on the back of a supply inventory, three weeks earlier, and Simon had carried the list around in his breast pocket until the lawyers stopped finding reasons. Proper hours, counted honestly, including the hour after events when the real mess happened. A rate that rose with the years instead of despite them. Two pairs of shoes a year, because floors are hard and knees are not replaceable. A name badge with a name on it, first and last, for every person on the night staff, in lettering the same size as the coaches wore.
Rosa Delgado found her that evening in the supply corridor, between the stacked towels and the caged bottles, holding her copy of the contract folded into quarters the way women of her generation fold anything they intend to keep. Rosa was fifty seven, widowed at forty nine, a grandmother of five, and she had cleaned other people's buildings for thirty one years, schools and a courthouse and one terrible winter a casino, and she had the straightest back and the driest humour of anyone Dee had ever worked beside. She did not embrace Dee. Rosa was not an embracing woman. She stood in the corridor with the contract in her fist and she looked for the words with the care of a person who spends words like money.
Thirty one years, Rosa said. People look at the floor I just did. They say, oh, nice, and they are talking to the floor. Not to me. To the floor. My grandchildren think I work in a place. They do not think the place knows me. She lifted the folded paper a little. Now the badge will have my whole name. Rosa Delgado. My mother's name was Delgado before me. When I wear it, I am not the lady. I am not the cleaning lady. I am Rosa Delgado, and if they want the floor, they can ask Rosa Delgado if she has done it yet.