It became, over the day, a small routine, and routines, Dee knew, were how rooms learned what they were permitted to do. At the water fountain, filling his bottle a second time while she changed the bin beside it, he said, to the room and not to her, "Careful, guys, don't splash the floor, you'll put our girl out of a job, she's got it down to an art form." In the corridor, passing her cart, he said, "You ever get tired of watching, sweetheart? All these years, front row seat, never in the game. That's gotta sting." In the lobby at four, to a pair of new members who had come in for the open house tour and did not know where to look, he said, "This is Dee, she runs the place," and let the laugh build before he finished, "—runs the mop, anyway. Dee, tell them about the showers, tell them about the knees."
Some people laughed. That was the part Dee noted, without heat, the way she noted everything that would need attending to later. Some people laughed the real laugh of people who had found something funny, and some laughed the other one, the laugh that was a door closing, the laugh of people deciding very quickly which side of a room was safer to stand on. Jenna did not laugh. Jenna stood in the cage doorway with her wraps half done and watched, and her face did the thing Dee had seen it do in the third round of hard fights, when Jenna had decided that a price was going to be paid and was simply choosing the moment.
"Don't," Dee said to her, quietly, in passing, with a cloth over her shoulder.
"Don't what? I haven't done anything."
"You are doing it with your face."
"He's doing it with his whole self, Dee. In your building. In front of a camera that he brought."
"It is Simon's building," Dee said. "And it is one week. Men like that are weather. You don't fight weather, Jenna. You put out buckets and wait for it to go and be somebody else's problem."
"That's what you really think? Weather?"
Dee looked at her, and Jenna, who was nobody's fool, looked back and understood that the answer was more complicated and was not going to be given in a corridor at four in the afternoon, and she finished her wraps with short, violent tugs and went back to the mats and hit the heavy bag for twenty minutes with an industry that made Yusuf wander over, eventually, and stand with his hands behind his back, and say, to no one in particular, that the bag had never offended anyone in the whole history of the world.
Simon's unease, meanwhile, grew in direct proportion to his investment, which is the usual arithmetic. He laughed at the jokes a half-second late, and too loudly, and then, catching Dee's eye once across the lobby, looked away first, which told her everything. He cornered her at five by the store room, where she was laying out the extra chairs for the evening rehearsal, and spoke in the hushed, reasonable tone of a man asking the world to stay in its assigned shape.
"Dee. Dee, listen. He's— the sponsors, the management company, if this week goes right we're talking about the roof, we're talking about the new furnace, we're talking about— You're a professional, I know that, I don't have to tell you. It's just till Friday."
"I know what it is till, Simon."
"I mean, some people, they might take the jokes the wrong way—"
"Some people might," Dee agreed pleasantly, "take them exactly the way they were told. He tells them very clearly. He's a good communicator. It's why they give him the microphone."
Simon winced. "I'm asking you to help me."
"I am helping you," Dee said. "I have cleaned this building three times today because his people track in gravel like it's a sacrament. I've smiled at his camera. I found his mouthguard, Simon, in a drain. What I won't do—" she set the last chair down and straightened it, precisely, against its neighbour, "—is shrink. I'm forty-eight years old and I've been the exact same height since I was sixteen. There's no smaller size available."
He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his face, behind the sponsor smile, was the man who had given a night cleaner a set of keys and a raise he could not afford in the second year because she had stayed through the winter the pipes burst, and that man said, "You know what? Fair. That's fair." And then, because he was also the other man, the roof man, the furnace man, he added, "Just— Friday. Whatever happens, Friday, help me get to the end of Friday," and she said she would do her best, which was, they both understood, a more complicated promise than it sounded.