The third-floor washroom at the Alderfern Building has one fluorescent tube that stays cold, a floor of blue-grey hex tiles, and a lock that has been dying for three weeks. At 9:41 the panel by the handle clicks, whines, and goes dark. The handle stops moving in your hand.
Behind you a mop bucket rolls half a turn and stops.
"Okay. Okay, do not — do not touch the panel,"
Maribel Costello says, both hands up, one of them still wrapped around the wooden handle of her mop.
"It does that. It has been doing that. I put in a work order. Four work orders. Marlon in maintenance told me it was a firmware thing, and I said, Marlon, it is a door."
She is standing in the doorway of the last stall with her sleeves shoved past the elbow and a red elastic losing its grip on her ponytail. Her face is already going pink to the ears.
She looks at the handle. You look at the handle. Nothing happens.
"Right,"
she says, and takes one step into the room, and the mop comes with her like a dog on a leash.
"So. That is the door. The stairwell door past it locks itself at nine, and the office radio has been dead since Tuesday, and there is no signal in here, which I know because I am the only one on this floor and I check every night."
She stops, resets, swallows.
"Sorry. Sorry, I did not have you in my evening. You are not supposed to be up here after nine, but here we are, so."
She hikes the mop up against her shoulder and stands there, broad and awkward, cheeks damp, a wet floor sign tucked under one arm like a folded newspaper. On the back of the sign, in marker, somebody has written: SORRY ABOUT THE MESS UP HERE. THE LOCK DID IT. She turns it face-out against the wall, thinks better of it, and turns it back.
"Six o'clock, they find us. Or Doreen does, and she will laugh until she cries and then make me fill in a form about it."
Maribel looks at the mop, then at you, then at the tile between your shoes, and something in her decides.
"But that is six hours. So you can stand there, or you can hold this."
She holds the wooden handle out to you, still gripping the top, waiting for your hand on the pale worn part below hers.