LITMIR.BIZ

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      “YO, HOT STUFF, it’s almost closing time. Grab some java, make the rounds, and pick up the tab at table two.” Al, the short-order cook, barked the orders without looking up as he industriously scraped the metal spatula across the grill. The air smelled of grease and onions, lingering reminders of the dozens of meals Al had fried and grilled that evening at Davey’s Diner.

      Robin Lee stopped wiping down the wooden butcher block in the back of the kitchen, a chore that was part of her nightly clean-up ritual, and stared at Al. For the four months she’d known him since starting her tenure as kitchen prep at this Denver eatery, he’d reminded her of a Santa Claus gone bad—rotund, gruff and moody. If words were gifts, he gave out few. And of those few, she never thought she’d hear him call her something sassy like “hot stuff.” Not quiet, industrious Robin who Al had never seen in anything other than one of her four white rayon, wash-and-wear outfits. Add her white sneakers, fine blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a slash of pink lipstick that sufficed for makeup and she was hardly the image of a “hot stuff.”

      Al typically said it like it was, and truth was a trait she admired above all others. So she chalked up his endearment as an attempt at charm. And he definitely needed to slather on plenty of charm—even more slathering than he did with the butter he smeared on every-thing—if he wanted her to play waitress.

      “Move it, hot stuff,” he repeated. “With Dottie gone, I need you out dere.”

      Charm mystery solved. After Al’s fight tonight with Dottie, the fifty-something waitress who’d stomped out of the diner while mumbling a few choice words about control-freak cooks, he was obviously trying to butter up Robin by calling her “hot stuff.” He needed her to finish Dottie’s few tables so they could close. What Al didn’t realize was that no matter how many terms of endearment he concocted, no way was she going “out dere.” In fact, she wished desperately she’d never come “out here” to Denver because she’d never been comfortable in the big city. An uncomfortableness that bordered on unbearable after what had happened today.

      Tonight of all nights, she wanted to keep to herself, do her kitchen thing and not get involved in potential conversations with anyone, especially total strangers slugging down the remnants of their coffee at midnight in a diner. No way, no how. Not after the worst day in the life of twenty-six-year-old Robin Lee.

      Okay—just in case she was being overly dramatic, which her mom often accused her of—if this hadn’t been the worst day in her life, it ranked in the top five, hands down. As she rinsed the rag she used to clean the butcher block, she mentally calculated, for the umpteenth time, everything that had gone wrong. First, her lifeline to the world—her beloved ten-year-old Jeep she’d nicknamed “Em” for Emily Dickinson, her favorite poet—had been towed because she’d parked on the street-cleaning side of the street. Then she’d spent fifteen precious dollars taking a taxi to DU, Denver University, only to tear into the lecture hall twenty minutes late. But what absolutely skyrocketed today into the top five had been when the professor, who loved to lecture tardy students on the principles of punctuality, decided to make an example out of Robin.

      She cringed, reliving the horror of it all. She’d barely sat down before Professor Geller called her to the front of the room and instructed her to tell the class about the key points of last night’s homework assignment. She’d read the homework, a novel by Sherwood Anderson, which had been far more than an “assignment”—it had been a privilege because

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