"You sound awake," Carla said.
"I have been awake since the earth cooled. How was the night?"
"Long. We had a man come in who'd fallen off a ladder putting up his own anniversary banner, which is romantic and also a lesson." There was a pause full of hospital sounds, a trolley, a distant voice. "Are you eating? Actually eating, not coffee and intentions?"
"I am eating eggs," Dee said, which was true; she was eating eggs standing at the counter, with toast, like a person in complete command of her life. "With hot sauce. Like a queen."
"Good. Because tonight's the circus, right? The big man's anniversary thing."
"The circus is tonight." Dee looked out of her small window at the street beginning to fill. "And all week. Banners. A man is coming to cut a ribbon with scissors the size of hedge trimmers. Simon showed me."
"Are they paying you for the extra?"
"Simon is paying me and apologising in rotation."
"That's the Greer special." Carla's voice softened, the way it did when she was tired past the point of jokes. "Don't let them make you the entertainment, Mama. You know how gyms get when there's an audience and a camera. Somebody always has to be the joke, and it's always the person they think can't answer back."
"I can answer back," Dee said mildly. "I'm famous for it. I answer back in two languages and one of them is mopping."
Carla laughed, and then she said she had to go and save the county, and Dee said to save a little of it for herself, and they hung up in the comfortable, unceremonious way of people who would speak again tomorrow. Dee washed her plate. She dried it and put it away, because order was knowing where a thing would be, and then, because the morning had a little slack in it before she needed to sleep for two hours in the daylight way of night workers, she opened the drawer by the sink where she kept the things that had no proper category: batteries, tape, a key that belonged to a lock she no longer owned, and, under a folded dish towel, in a small scuffed box that had once held good chocolates, a medal on a ribbon gone stiff with years.
She did not take it out. She rarely took it out. She rested two fingers on the box, the way you might rest them on the shoulder of someone in a crowd, just to know they were there, and she thought, not in words, about a hall a long way from San Tomas and a long way from now, about noise coming down like weather, about being twenty-four and so fast, so certain, that the ground had felt like a rumour under her feet. Her shoulder gave its small familiar twinge, as if it too remembered and had opinions. Then the bakery downstairs sent up a fresh wave of warmth and sugar, and Dee closed the drawer, gently, and went to lie down in the shuttered room and sleep the thin, efficient sleep of people who work at night, while the town went about its morning without her.
She had told Carla, once, the whole story, or most of it, on the night Carla turned eighteen and asked, with the directness that age permits, why there was a photograph in her grandmother's house of her mother in a white jacket being lifted on somebody's shoulders. She had told Jenna Park, two years ago, about a third of it, in answer to a question about why she never watched the judo class that rented the mats on Thursdays without going very quiet. She had told Simon Greer none of it, because Simon had hired a cleaner and a cleaner was what she intended, in his building, to be. What the rest of the town knew, if it knew anything, it knew in the vague way towns know things about people who have lived quietly in them for decades: that Dee Marenco had been, in her youth, some kind of athlete, somewhere else, and that she did not talk about it, and that the subject, if raised, would be met with a look of such mild and total finality that even the brave went elsewhere for conversation.