She works in a diner called the Desert Rose, which sits along the northwestern edge of Colorado, near the Utah border. The diner is a small and undistinguished affair, all dark wood and oxblood-leather, worn and weathered, but always brightly lit and burning like a little beacon in a high American wasteland. Triangles of cherry pie sit bleeding in the pie case, and strips of honey-yellow flypaper spiral from the low stucco ceiling.

She was born and raised in a tiny mountain town one-hundred miles southeast. She grew up slender and pretty, a kind of patrician’s elegance about her, self-reliant, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes with all the other small-town boys and girls: one of them, yet always somehow slightly apart without meaning to be. She began working when she was in the tenth grade — an indefatigable worker, no matter the job — and she’s not stopped working since. Waiting tables is what she’s done for most of her life. She graduated high school but never went to college. After that, she drifted awhile, developed a taste for books, black coffee, functional knowledge.

By age thirty-seven, she’d already buried two husbands, both miners, one killed in a car crash, the other dead by disease. She has two teenage children who love her. Now, unmarried, no longer young but not yet old, she is beautiful still, and elegant. She listens to soft jazz on her transistor radio and reads and reads in her rented apartment that’s too small for three.

There have been many other jobs — night-auditor, bank-teller, housecleaner — but waitressing is the one she’s always come back to. There are no special skills in her repertoire, no trade beyond waitressing. She’s well-read, her mind of a naturally speculative cast, and she quotes to herself from old poets (“full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air”).

At twilight, invariably, there’s a sense of melancholy that comes over her.

Fifty feet behind the diner called Desert Rose, a cluster of cottonwoods grows along the banks of a sea-green river. They are ancient and massive trees. Wind moves sluggishly through their dusty boughs, and moonlike globes of cotton orbit the bodies of the trees and fall soundlessly into the molecular water. Sparse grass grows along the desert floor, and the desert stretches off into the wooly horizon.

At the end of her shift, she likes to stand at the back porch of the diner and listen to the wind sifting through the grass. Certain times of the year there are blue and violet flowers, slender and strange, which grow among the river stalks. Sometimes she thinks she can smell their sweetness on the desert air. The bone-colored moon rises meanwhile in the east and fills a small quadrant of the sky, suffusing the clouds with its soft and sulfurous light.

(This is a chapter from my latest.)