The storage closet smelled like clementine and dust and the ghost of spilled sugar, and Ruby Maynard stood inside it with her back to the shelves and her hand still on the door, and she did not move to let him pass.

"You going to stand in the hall all day, or you going to come in?"

Georgia stepped in. The door swung shut behind him and the yellow overhead light buzzed, and Ruby reached past his hip and turned the deadbolt. From the inside. He watched her do it and said nothing, because the lock only worked from the outside — Hazel had said so, Dolly had said so — and Ruby's thumb found the little brass tongue anyway and slid it home like it had always been hers to move.

"That lock's on the outside," he said.

"It's on the outside when the door's shut from the outside." She let her hand fall. "You ever try it from in here?"

He hadn't. Two years of closet, two years of the little catch and give, and he had never once closed himself in and tried the bolt. Ruby read it off his face and smiled with one side of her mouth.

"Uh-huh. Thought so."

She moved first. She stepped off the door and into the narrow aisle between the shelves, and the wrap skirt fanned her hips as she turned, and she put her empty tray — the good one, the one that wasn't broken — down flat on a crate of canned peaches and sat herself on the edge of it like it was a bench built for her. The red flower in her hair caught the light. Georgia stayed by the door with his hands at his sides and his apron strings loose and the wet spot on the apron turned around to the back where nobody could see it, and he could feel the fryer oil drying on his forearms and the coffee gone cold in his stomach.

"So," he said. "Now."

"Now." Ruby crossed her legs at the ankle. "You look like a man waiting on a verdict."

"I've had a long shift."

"You've had a long three days." She looked at him the way Dolly looked at a customer who was going to tip bad — patient, and already counting. "Sit down, Georgia."

"On what."

"On the peaches. On the floor. I don't care. You're standing there like the door's about to open on you and I got a point to make, and I can't make it to a man holding his own apron strings."

He sat. The crate of peaches took his weight with a groan of tin, and his skirt rode up his thighs and he let it, because there was no one in here to see but her, and she had already seen everything there was to see of him on a corridor floor.

Ruby reached into the pocket of her wrap and brought out a folded square of paper, soft at the creases from being carried. She didn't hand it to him. She held it up between two fingers, painted nail and all, and watched him look at it.

"Hazel gave me this to run over to the mail slot on my break. You know what it is?"

"No."

"It's a letter. To a company in New Jersey." She turned it over. "The Jerry O'Mahony Diner Company. Elizabeth, New Jersey, fine manufacturers of diners, like Summit Diner in Summit, New Jersey."

Georgia knew the name. Everybody in the trade knew the name — O'Mahony built the diners, the real ones, the ones with the porcelain skin and the chrome and the counter that ran the whole length of the room. He had read about them in a magazine once at the barber's.

"She's buying a new one?"