"Come on." He beckoned, with two fingers, at her, in front of the committee, in front of Jenna and Yusuf and the college boys and the sponsors' assistant with her clipboard. "Dee. Our Dee. Nine years she's watched from the side. Nine years, best seat in the house. Let's give her thirty seconds in the game, huh? A fun demonstration. The champion versus the cleaning lady. People will love it. She catches an arm, I escape, everybody claps, we sell a roof. It's not a fight, Simon, don't have a stroke. It's theatre. She just has to hold on and look surprised."
The room did what rooms do. Somebody laughed, the brave laugh first, and then the other laugh went around the edges like draught under a door. Jenna stepped forward and Yusuf, without hurry, put a hand, not on her arm, but in her path, and said her name once. Simon said, "Blake, I don't think—" and ran out of sentence in the face of the camera, which had come up, smoothly, the way it had come up all week, because the camera, Dee thought, was the only thing in the building that never once looked away first.
She looked at the bucket. She looked at her hands on the mop handle, workman's hands, short nails, a scar across the second knuckle that she had carried since she was twenty-three and had earned in a place with mats very like these and noise very like weather. Her shoulder ached, in its old, unimportant way. Carla's voice came back to her out of the morning, clear as water: somebody always has to be the joke, and it's always the person they think can't answer back. And Yusuf's, out of the dark: you don't owe it smallness.
"All right," Dee said.
The room quietened, the way it had not quietened for Simon or the microphone.
"All right," she said again, and set the mop, carefully, at rest against the bucket, handle up, the way you set a thing down when you intend to come back to it. "On terms."
"Terms," Blake said, delighted. "She's got terms. The terms of the mop—"
"Sam Whitaker referees," Dee said, levelly, into the middle of his sentence. "Not your man, not Simon. Sam." Across the room, Sam, who had come to measure the cage for Friday and had stayed out of the whole thing with the determination of a man who had refereed four hundred bouts and buried two friends from the sport, lifted his head. "He starts it and he stops it, and nobody argues with him, including you. Second: a tap ends it. Instantly. If I tap, you let go like the thing's on fire. If you tap—" and she let one small beat of quiet live there, "—I let go the same way. No holding on for the camera. No extra second for the story. The tap is the end of the world. Third, it's a demonstration of holds only, no strikes, and it happens when Sam says the mats are right and not before. Those are the terms. Take them in front of all these witnesses, or find another story for your evening."
Blake looked at her for a moment the way you look at a dog that has spoken: with amusement first, and then, underneath it, the beginning of an older and less comfortable feeling, that the room had changed hands without anyone moving. "Done," he said, too quickly, waving it away, turning already to the camera. "Done, done, the lady has terms, everybody heard, we're all gentlemen— Sam, you got that? You're the law tomorrow."
"I heard," Sam Whitaker said. He was looking at Dee, and Dee was looking at him, and in that exchange there was something that was not in the running order and could not be printed. "I heard every word," Sam said. "And I'll hold every one of you to them. Her included." He nodded at Dee, once, the nod of a man paying a debt he had only just discovered. "Especially the tap."
Dee picked up her bucket by the handle, with both hands, close to her body, the way her knees preferred. "Then I'll finish the floor," she said. "It still needs doing before tomorrow."
And she went back to work, across the mats she had cleaned at dawn and would clean again at midnight, while the room rearranged itself around the moment it had just agreed to, and the camera followed her, without quite knowing why, for three steps longer than it should have.