"They can put it on the mop," Dee said. "It does most of the visiting."
Jenna's laugh followed her round the corner, and Dee allowed herself a small smile into her coffee. It was not nothing, being seen by one person at five in the morning. She had known years when she had not been seen by anyone at all, years when she had moved through the world in the particular camouflage of women who cleaned other people's spaces, and she knew the difference, and she kept the knowledge the way she kept everything, neatly and without display.
Yusuf Adeyemi came in at six, through the front door, with his newspaper folded under his arm to a precise quarter of its size, the way he had folded it every morning within living memory. Yusuf was sixty-eight, retired these eleven years from coaching wrestling at a level Dee understood to have been considerably higher than the club liked to boast about, because Yusuf himself never boasted about it at all. He helped at Copperline now, three mornings a week, for what Simon called a stipend and Yusuf called bus money, and he ran the early grappling hour with the air of a man defusing something.
"Dee," he said.
"Yusuf."
"The mats are clean."
"The mats are clean every morning, Yusuf."
"And every morning I say so," he said, "because a thing done well every day is rarer than a thing done brilliantly once, and should be announced." He set his newspaper down and looked out over the room, where the college wrestlers were already arguing cheerfully about a takedown. "They will dirty them in nine minutes."
"Eight," Dee said. "Tomasino brought new shoes."
Yusuf laughed, a low sound, and went to change, and Dee pushed her cart to the cage end of the room to do the last job of the morning, which was the one she privately liked best. One of the big crash mats had been left folded against the cage wall, out of place, and it needed to go back to the store room before the open house people arrived with their banners and their opinions about sight lines. The mat was heavy. It was meant to be moved by two people, and there was a dolly for it, which somebody had borrowed and not returned. Dee considered going to find help. She considered it the way she considered most requests for help, as a reasonable option that would cost more time than it saved. She set her feet, got her hips under the folded edge, took her grip low and close, and lifted with her legs and her back in the old, correct alignment, and walked the mat, in three controlled placements of her feet, the eleven paces to the store room door, and set it down inside without a sound and without once letting it drag.
When she turned, Yusuf was standing in the cage doorway with his shoes in his hand, watching her.
He did not say anything. That was the thing about Yusuf, and it was why she trusted him more than she trusted most people who talked. He looked at the mat, and he looked at the distance, and he looked at her hands, which she was flexing open and closed without thinking about it, loosening them, the way you loosened hands that had just done precise work under load. Then he nodded, once, to himself rather than to her, as if confirming a sum he had been doing quietly for some time.
"You want coffee before they ruin the floor?" she said.
"I want coffee," Yusuf said, "before I ruin it myself. It's a race."
Dee ate breakfast at home, if you could call it home at six forty in the morning before going back out into the day, because her shift was a split one in open house week: the dawn clean, a break, and then the long evening of the event itself, which Simon was paying her extra for and apologising for in the same breath every time he mentioned it, as if she might think he had invented work. Her apartment was two rooms over the bakery on Calle Luna, close enough that the smell of the morning baking came up through the floor, and she had lived there for fourteen years, since the divorce, since Carla had been ten and furious about the size of the bedroom, which was fair, because the bedroom was the size of a generous cupboard. Carla was twenty-four now and a nurse at the county hospital and living, to Dee's mixed pride and terror, in a place of her own across town with a housemate and a balcony and a cat named Chairman, and she telephoned her mother every morning at seven with the regularity of a woman who had inherited the family religion of keeping liturgies.