Autumn came back to San Tomas the way it always did, in one blue week at the end of September, and by then the new shape of Dee's life had stopped being news even to her. Tuesdays and Fridays she came in at night with her keys and her thermos and made the building clean and ready, alone with the long rooms and the ticking of the cooling pipes, and she loved those hours no less for being chosen now instead of merely necessary. Four mornings a week she came in before the sun with her other bag, the one with the wrapped hands and the old jacket whose cuffs Carla had mended twice, and taught whoever the dawn brought her. Yusuf visited on the first Friday of October, moving slowly down the corridor on his cane, refusing Eddie's arm with an insult so affectionate it counted as a caress, and stood for a long time in the doorway of the hall watching her teach a roomful of beginners how to be put on the floor by the world and get up unbothered by it. "You teach it the way it was taught to you," he said at last. "I had a good teacher," said Dee. "You had a stubborn teacher," Yusuf said, "who has lived long enough to see the whole room learn the lesson. That is not a common thing, Dolores. I intend to enjoy it rudely and at length." He did. He came every Friday after that and sat in the doorway with his tea, and corrected nothing, which from Yusuf Adeyemi was an ovation.
Carla came on the last morning of the season to watch the dawn class, home for a week with her bag by the door and her life, her real adult life, arranged in another city and going well, a fact that still occasionally astonished them both in the middle of ordinary sentences. She sat where the light came in. She watched her mother teach a bus driver of sixty to fall like a child, without fear and without apology, and she watched Jenna move down the line of students adjusting a hand here and a hip there with the total absence of hurry she had learned in that room, and she watched Blake Rennert's scholarship boy, the laundry wrestler, sit back on the mat laughing with his whole face at some error of his own, unafraid of being seen mid-lesson. And she understood, as she had understood in pieces all her life and completely only now, that the building had not discovered her mother that night in front of the crowd. The crowd had merely arrived, late, at a place Carla had lived since childhood: the place where Dolores Marenco was the most complete person in any room, at any hour, with a mop or without one.
There was also, that first season, a quiet afternoon when Dee found a new cleaner standing uncertainly in the corridor with a bucket, a young woman hired for the evening shift who had been given a ring of keys, no map of the building, and the particular loneliness of starting work in a place that had not yet learned her name. Dee took her the whole round, cupboard to cupboard, tap to temperamental tap, showing her where everything lived and how the boiler liked to be spoken to, and at the end she wrote the young woman's name in the duty book in her small exact hand and said, "If anyone talks to you like you're part of the furniture, you come and tell me. The furniture here gets treated better than that." The young woman laughed, startled, and then did not look lonely any more, and Dee went back to her class with the unremarkable satisfaction of a person who has repaired, in passing, exactly the thing that once needed repairing in her.