Georgia stepped out first because Hazel's hand was on the door and there was no version of standing still that didn't look worse. The corridor smelled like fry grease and the wet mop that lived in the bucket by the back exit, and his heels clicked twice on the linoleum before he remembered to walk like a woman who hadn't just been caught.

Dolly came out behind him, apron straight, hair pushed back off her forehead with two fingers. She didn't look at Hazel. She looked down the corridor toward the dining room, where a tray of glasses was still sitting on the pass and a customer was knocking a spoon against the rim of his coffee cup, and she walked toward it like nothing in the world had happened.

Hazel let the closet door swing shut on its own. It bounced once against the frame and didn't catch.

"Counter," she said, to Georgia's back. "Tomorrow. No apron. You heard me the first time."

"I heard you."

"Then why are you still standing in my corridor?"

Georgia went. The swinging door took him in the hip on the way through, hard enough to make the bell over it jump, and the dining room opened up around him the way it always did in the lull — four booths, half the counter, the fry cook scraping the flat top in the back, the percolator hissing at the end of the line like it had been waiting for him.

He put his hand on the register because it was there and because his fingers wanted something cool. The drawer was shut. The total on the little window said 11:42 and $4.85 and neither of those numbers meant anything to him anymore.

Then he felt it.

Not a look. The room had been looking at him since the first morning he'd walked in with his legs shaved and his eyebrows done and a blue dress that Hazel had cut two inches shorter at the hem before she'd let him on the floor. He was used to the look. What he felt now was different — it was the specific weight of one pair of eyes that had stopped pretending to be interested in anything else.

Ruby Maynard sat in the corner booth with her back to the window and one elbow on the Formica, and the red and yellow of her dress was so loud against the brown vinyl that it looked like somebody had spilled something there and never cleaned it up. Her neckline dropped in a long dark V that caught the morning light from the plate glass and gave it back warmer. A little red flower sat pinned in her curls over her left ear. She had a coffee cup in front of her that she wasn't drinking and a plate with a half-eaten short stack that she wasn't eating, and she was watching Georgia the way a cat watches a window it intends to go out of.

She smiled when she caught him catching her. Slow. Not the smile she gave the truckers. The other one.

Georgia grabbed the coffee pot off the burner without thinking about it and started down the counter. The pot was heavier than it needed to be and the handle was warm and the steam came up off the spout in a thin rope that bent toward his face. He poured for the trucker at the end — a man in a canvas jacket with a red tag on the collar and a pencil behind his ear — and the man said much obliged without looking up from his racing form, and Georgia said anytime, hon, and reaching across the counter to top him off pulled the hem of his skirt up the back of his thighs, and he felt the air of the diner find the bare skin above his stockings like a hand.

He didn't pull it down. He took his time with the pot, and then he took his time setting it back on the burner, and when he turned around Ruby's finger was tracing the rim of her cup in a slow circle, once, twice, and her eyes hadn't moved off him the whole time.

"Georgia."

Hazel's voice came from the pass with the clipboard in it, sharp as a dropped plate. She was standing with her back to the kitchen and her eyes on the counter, and the counter was streaked where the trucker had slopped his coffee and where somebody had set a ketchup bottle down without a napkin under it.

"Wipe it down."

"I'm on it."

"You're standing."

"I'm on it."

He got the rag off the sink behind the register and the spray bottle of vinegar water and came back around, and the rag was cold and the vinegar smell cut through the fry grease for about a foot around him, and he started at the far end by the pie case and worked toward the register so his back would be to Ruby and not his front. The pie case glass was clean — Hazel made sure of that — and it caught everything. His reflection in it was a blue skirt and a white apron and a face that had gone a little pink across the cheekbones, and behind his reflection, blurred through the glass, was the whole dining room, and in the corner of it, sitting very still, the yellow and the red.

He sprayed and wiped. He sprayed and wiped. The ketchup came up in a long smear and then nothing. He reached across the pie case to get the far edge and the skirt rode up again and he let it, and he heard the coffee cup in the corner booth settle against its saucer with a small dry click.

Hazel was watching the pass. Hazel was always watching the pass. But Hazel's eyes came down the counter once, slow, and stopped on the hem of his skirt, and then went back up to the pass, and her jaw did something under the skin that Georgia didn't have a word for.

He was almost to the register when Ruby stood up.

She did it unhurried, the way she did everything, and the dress moved with her and settled, and she picked up her cup in one hand and her saucer in the other and walked the length of the counter with her hips doing what they did, and she set the cup down on the counter in front of Georgia like she was paying a toll.

"Top me off, sugar."

"You barely touched the last one."

"Maybe I like it hot."

Georgia took the pot off the burner and poured. She watched his hand on the handle. She watched his wrist. When the cup was full she didn't pick it up — she put her palm flat on the counter and leaned in over it, and the counter was narrow, and the drop of her neckline was right there, and Georgia looked at it because there was nowhere else to look, and she knew he was looking, and she smiled at him over the steam.

"I heard the noise," she said, quiet. "From the corridor."

"There wasn't any noise."

"There was." She straightened up and took the cup and sipped it without looking away from him. "It's fine. I didn't come out to see."

"Ruby—"

"I said it's fine." She set the cup down and turned, and the turn brought her hip past the corner of the counter close enough that the dress brushed his apron, and she walked back toward her booth with her heels making a soft even sound on the tile. Halfway there she stopped. She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a napkin — the paper kind, the diner kind, the kind that came folded under the silverware — and she folded it once, and folded it again, and set it down on the counter at the end nearest her booth, and walked the rest of the way back and sat down like she'd done nothing at all.

Georgia finished the counter. He wiped the register ledge. He wiped the ketchup bottle. He straightened the salt and pepper and the sugar dispenser and the little stand of jam packets, and he did all of it with his eyes on the napkin at the end of the counter and his hands doing something else entirely.

The trucker paid. Georgia rang him up and made change and said come back, hon, and the trucker said I will, and the bell over the door jumped and the plate glass threw a long rectangle of morning across the floor and then it was just Georgia and the percolator and Ruby in the corner booth with her short stack and her coffee getting cold.

He picked up the napkin because he had to. It was heavier than paper should be, folded twice over on itself, and he could feel the edge of something written on the inside through the layers. He turned his back to the room and opened it against his chest.

One word. Ballpoint. The ink had bled a little at the end of the last letter, the way it did when somebody pressed hard and fast.

Later.

"Georgia."

He folded the napkin and put it in the pocket of his apron and turned around. Hazel was at the end of the counter with the clipboard against her hip, and her face was the face she wore when she was about to say something that wasn't about the diner.

"Your break's at noon," she said. "Take it out back. Not in the closet."

"Hazel—"

"Not in the closet." She tapped the clipboard once against her thigh and looked past him, down the counter, to the corner booth, where Ruby was finishing the last of her short stack with her eyes closed like it was the best thing she'd eaten all week. Hazel's mouth did the thing again. "I've got inventory at noon. Fry cook's got the flat top. I don't want to hear anything from the back of this building for twenty minutes."

She walked off toward the kitchen with the clipboard and the heels and the red dress, and the swinging door took her, and the bell over it jumped, and the dining room was just the two of them and the percolator.

Georgia looked at the clock above the pass. 11:51.

He wiped the same spot on the counter three more times. He restacked the jam packets. He filled the sugar dispenser from the bag under the register and spilled a little on the Formica and wiped that up too, and the whole time the napkin sat in his apron pocket against his thigh, and the whole time Ruby sat in her booth with her coffee gone cold and her cup turned a quarter-turn to the left, watching him the way she'd been watching him since eleven o'clock.

At 11:58 a party of four came in and wanted the window and Georgia seated them and took their order and called it back to the fry cook through the pass, and when he turned around Ruby had stood up again and was smoothing the front of her dress down over her hips, slow, both hands, and she wasn't looking at him anymore. She was looking at the swinging door to the back.

The clock ticked over.

Georgia untied his apron and hung it on the hook under the register and walked the length of the counter toward the back, past the pie case and the pass and the percolator, and the swinging door took him in the hip again — softer this time — and the bell over it jumped, and the corridor closed around him, yellow light and fry grease and the wet mop in its bucket by the taped-over back exit.

He heard the second set of heels behind him before he heard the door swing.

Ruby didn't say anything. She walked past him down the corridor to the end of it, to the storage closet, and she put her hand flat on the door and pushed. The latch stuck the way it always stuck — Georgia knew the sound of it, the little catch and give — and she pushed again, harder, and the door came open onto the dark, and the smell that came out of it was clementine and dust and the ghost of the spilled sugar.

She looked back at him over her shoulder. The red flower in her hair was a bright spot in the yellow light.

"Now," she said.