The cleaning staff contracts were the part of it that never made a newspaper, and they were the part Dee thought about when she thought about what had changed. In the month after the exhibition, every cleaner, caretaker and night worker at Copperline was moved onto a written contract with the hours stated, the pay stated, the overtime stated and the name of the job stated in words that matched the work. Simon signed them at the long table in the office with Eddie Krol as a witness, and he did it without ceremony, which Dee considered the correct way to do a right thing late. Her own contract was the last of the pile. He slid it across to her himself. "Read it before you sign it," he said. "I know," she said. "I taught you that." Something moved in his face that was almost a smile and entirely an apology, and she signed, and he signed below her, and the paper went into the folder with the others, where it belonged, neither above nor below anyone else's.
The coaching offer came in the early summer, though by then it had been coming for so long that its arrival felt like weather rather than news. Simon made it properly, in the office, with the door closed and a written sheet of terms, because he was learning. Head beginner coach, he said. Her own programme. The dawn slot and two evenings if she wanted them, a salary that made Carla, when she heard it, sit down on the arm of the couch and say words Dee pretended not to hear, and her name, Dolores Marenco, on the coaching board in the hall in the same size of lettering as every other coach in the building's history. He had even, she noticed, had the board brought out of storage to show her, leaning against the office wall with its varnished decades of names. Yusuf's was near the top, in the hand-painted lettering of another era. It had never once occurred to her, in all the years of emptying the bin beneath it, that her name would fit on that board. She sat looking at it for longer than the negotiation required.
Then she negotiated, and Simon, who had prepared himself for gratitude or refusal, discovered that he had prepared for neither. She would coach, she said. The dawn beginners' class, four mornings a week, and one evening of fundamentals, because fundamentals were the whole of it and beginners deserved the real thing. She would not give up the cleaning entirely. Two shifts a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, on the new contract, at the new rate. He stared at her. The money, he said, gently, as if she had misread the sheet: the coaching salary made the shifts unnecessary. "I know what it makes them," Dee said. "I like the building at night. I like knowing where everything is and that it's ready in the morning. I'm not ashamed of that work, Simon. I'm not going to act like the coaching rescued me from it. They're both mine. Two shifts." He argued, because arguing was his trade, and she listened to all of it with the patience of a woman dismantling a frame at the wrist, and at the end of it he wrote her terms onto the sheet in his own hand, two shifts, Tuesdays and Fridays, and initialled them, and shook her hand across the desk with an expression a man wears when he has been beaten fairly at something he did not know he was contesting. "Eleven minutes and forty seconds, my terms," she told him. "This took longer." "Everything with you takes longer," Simon said. "That's the point of you, I gather." "Now you're learning," said Dee.
Jenna Park became her assistant for the dawn class, because Dee asked for her by name and because Jenna, arriving at five in the morning with her hair still wet from the shower and her notebook already open, turned out to have a gift for teaching beginners that Dee recognised as rarer than talent: she never made a new person feel slow. The class filled slowly and then, in the way of true things, suddenly. There were night nurses and bus drivers and two grandmothers who had come, at first, only to watch each other, and then had stayed to learn how to fall. There was the laundry wrestler from the scholarship fund, who moved like a man apologising to the air until Dee taught him that the air was not offended. Blake Rennert came twice in the first month, unannounced, in the grey hour before his own training, and drilled the falling exercises with the beginners without a word of rank, and the second time he stayed afterwards and held the bucket while Dee rinsed the mop, and said, "My corner told me that night that you were reading the chorus. I didn't know I had one." "Everyone has one," Dee said. "Yours is just famous." He considered this with the seriousness of a man revising a religion, and then he took the mop from her, correctly, without being asked badly or thanked excessively, and finished the strip she had started, badly, and then, under instruction, adequately. She let him. It seemed to her that letting people help, correctly, was also a technique, and one she was still learning, and that a bout is not the only place a person can be on time.