The dress, she saw first. It reminded her of decades ago, comment? Blue like fresh-spun skies and full skirted and the woman who sat in the window-seat looked like she had been snipped out of a fifties color magazine, a film star for taping to the wall. Ana had those, you understand. Walls and walls of fading paper prints, until the women in them had long since faded themselves.
She was not fifties-fresh herself. She wore a tea-dress, faded cotton washed to pale lilac and frayed at the hem and beneath she wore boots suitable for lugging clay and pots. A jacket over shoulders, sheepskin-lined and warm and the mass of heavy curls was pinned haphazard to the back of her head, knotted above the base of her skull. Ana did not look as if she had walked into diners before like this one, with women and men who dressed like they were waiting to go to a Doris Day movie when such things were usual.
She walked into this one. She took coffee from the counter, black and bitter and scorching hot and she cradled her own mug in strong, scarred hands before she smiled at the woman who resembled a film-magazine. "It is a beautiful dress." Accented and entirely honest.