"I know it standing up, mostly," Dee said. "The knees are for the showers. They're the worst."
It was not a joke she had planned. It came out dry and level, in the tone she used for the weather, and it landed in the room in a way she could feel rather than hear: a tiny shift, a breath from Jenna who had come out of the locker room corridor at exactly the wrong or right moment, a startled blink from Simon. Blake's smile stayed where it was, because his smile was professional, but something behind it recalculated, briefly, and did not like the result, and covered the dislike with volume.
"She's funny," he announced to the camera, to Eddie, to the room. "The cleaning lady's funny. Nine years and she's got jokes. That's what I love about these old gyms, man, the characters. You don't get characters at the big performance centres. You get staff who know their place and they stay in it."
"We're very traditional," Dee said, and folded her cloth, once, precisely, and if Yusuf had been in the room he would have recognised the fold, and what it cost, and what it saved.
The open house week had been Simon's idea and Simon's gamble, and by the second day Dee had come to understand it the way she understood weather moving in off the desert: as a system, with fronts and pressures, that would do what it did regardless of anyone's feelings about it. Copperline was ten years old in a building that was a hundred, in a town that was losing its young people to Albuquerque and Phoenix at the steady rate of a leaking bucket, and the club survived, as so many unfashionable things survive, on loyalty, on Yusuf's early hour, on Jenna and fighters like her who could have trained in glossier rooms and chose not to. But loyalty did not pay a roof, and the roof, this year, needed paying. So Simon had invited sponsors. He had invited the local paper, which had sent, so far, nobody. He had invited Blake Rennert, whose management company had a development deal in the county and a fondness for photographable grassroots virtue, and Blake's presence, Simon explained to the committee in the office with the door almost closed, was worth six months of everybody else's goodwill, if everybody would just be, and he had searched for the word with real desperation, normal.
Dee, who had been cleaning the office at the time and was therefore, by the ancient law of such rooms, not present, had said nothing. But she had thought that a week built on asking people to be normal in the presence of a man who had never once been asked to be normal himself was a week with a structural flaw in it, like the second shower head, and that it would drip.
It dripped all day Tuesday, in small ways. Blake trained in the late morning with the mats to himself, the session cleared for him as a courtesy, and he trained well, Dee would give him that without being asked, because she had never in her life been able to watch good movement and call it bad out of spite. He was fast in the way that money and youth and ten thousand repetitions make a man fast, his combinations arrived in clean, contemptuous strings, and when he grappled with Eddie's senior student, a quiet twenty-nine-year-old named Robson who had been brought along for the purpose, he flowed around the man's guard like water around a post. He was, in the narrow and genuine sense, excellent. It was everything he did between the rounds that was the problem. He drank from a bottle and dropped it where he stood for somebody else to find. He gave an interview, on the mats, in his wraps, to the young woman with the tablet, in which he described Copperline as "raw" and "real" and "the kind of place where champions are made before they know better," and Robson, standing behind him with his own towel, looked at the floor with an expression Dee recognised from church. He signed the anniversary banner with a marker the size of a rolling pin, across four inches of other people's signatures.
And he returned, as men of his kind returned to a reliable effect, to Dee.