When one of us spoke of it later, which was not often, she would end with a question: That was weird, right? The rest of us would shrug, pausing a moment before talking about something else.

Normally we were a co-ed crew, but it was all girls that day: Paula taking phone orders and ringing up customers at the register, Donna beating out the cool rounds of dough, Barb on clean-up and dishes in the back. I was making the pizzas, which was my most frequent station. I'd learned to spin the dough in the air. I could eye, without counting, the twenty-five slices of pepperoni that the franchise required on a large pie, for purposes of inventory and quality control. They'd run the numbers, our owner told us, and we'd all learned it was better not to extend conversation with him. Or even to make eye contact when it wouldn't be rude not to.

The person making the pizzas also manned the ovens. Even after I quit that job, I had oval red burns on the pale side of my right forearm from reaching into the top oven. One day I noticed they were gone, but that was after years.

That's beside the point, because all I'm trying to say here is that it was all girls working that day, and the owner wasn't there. Nor the manager, who was a curly, curvy, not-teenaged woman named Mila. I'd felt weird around Mila since the day some older guys from my school came in to pick up four everything pies, smelling of beer, and asked me when my shift ended. "Do you think they'll come back?" I'd asked Mila, who seemed to know some things, having been out in the world in a career we vaguely understood to have failed. "I hope not," she'd said, and after a while told me to leave early and she'd clock me out at my scheduled time. I'd wanted to wait, because the boys were good looking and popular, but no one can turn down the chance to be paid for nothing.

It might have been good if Mila had been there that day the woman came in, looking undone in a way that went beyond her tumbling hair and untucked blouse and asking to use the restroom, crying when we told her there was no public restroom or even one for customers since we were a takeout place and not required by law to provide one. "Staff only," read the sign on the door near the register. "Staff only," read the sign on the restroom beyond it. "By law," Donna said.

"I'm bleeding," she pleaded, and we all felt the sympathy of being caught short, of a period come early, though that was better than one that was late, Barb had said more than once. Mila would have known whether to break a rule or not. The owner could have rubbed his salted beard and granted an exemption. Or denied one, telling her to try the convenience store down the block or suggesting she just make it home.

But they were not there, though we knew the owner liked to pop by without warning, rarely with his wife and more often when there was an all-girl crew. Or when I was working, or when Paula was. If he was stopping by, though, it wouldn't be Barb assigned to the back with the dishes. It would be Paula or me, hard to say which one of us, because he was unpredictable like that.

It was Paula who decided, opening the door by the register from the inside, pointing the woman to the bathroom, saying, "Five minutes or it's our ass."

As the woman shuffled by us, we saw the blood on her skirt but also strands of hair fallen from her chignon and the dirty scrape on her cheek.

"She wasn't kidding," Paula whispered. "A real mess..."

Outside the plates of glass that were wall and not just window, a man slowed and trained his gaze on me. Probably he watched his own reflection, and his arms hung loose at his sides. So I relaxed, too, until I saw the clenched hands, and I did not exhale until he walked on.

A week later, we told Mila, because it felt like a thing that should be told to someone who knew about the world. She asked why we hadn't called the police, and we said that all the woman had done was use the bathroom.

"Not on her," Mila said. "For her."

We didn't answer that, because the owner came in then, and we didn't want him to know what we had done.

.