The plant guy came in, rustling his garbage bags, ready to take away the month’s orchids and swap them out for new ones. I watched him lift the flower from the pot on the desk and drop it into the mouth of the bag, the delicate white petals swallowed in darkness, though when he saw Luis he straightened, gestured to the bag. Luis smiled at him and crouched at the man’s feet, removed the orchid, and placed it into an empty Windex bottle that he had cut in half.

“Luis does that sometimes,” Emily said. “If he’s on shift when it’s plant day. He likes to rescue them. Otherwise they just get thrown away.”

Luis retreated, cradling his orchid in the crook of his arm, and the man bent to his little wagon for another plant, dropped a new orchid, identical to the last, in the other one’s place. He left a small crumble of soil on the counter, and the earthy, damp smell of it briefly filled the air. Wild and dirty but real.

After he left, Emily and I restocked lipsticks and pans of blush from the late summer color collection, Indian Summer Dreams. As I emptied my second box, I looked up at the photo of the spa’s founder, Geraldine Austin, that was mounted above the vanity mirrors in the boutique. That severe sheen on her leather riding boots, the gloss on the horse’s coat. The grim set of her mouth, as though she knew that, in sixty years, two young women would sit on the floor of an establishment bearing her name and we would let her down in a way too beneath her to even articulate.

“Do you think that we are doing any good here?” I asked Emily.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Are we good at our jobs? Customer service jobs are practically designed for failure. We have to depend on other people being patient, reasonable, sane, in order to serve them well. Or do you mean good good. Like morally? Because for starters, I’m pretty sure these lipsticks aren’t cruelty-free.”

“I don’t know. Do we ever have the opportunity to help people? Do people really come here thinking that we can make them the better versions of themselves? Do we give them that in any way? Or are we just trading on their insecurities?”

Emily lifted a stack of eye shadow palettes out of the box. “I don’t know. People confuse better and better looking all the time. I read that humans ascribe morality to people who are attractive, and they are suspicious of people who aren’t. Even from the time you’re a baby. We are preprogrammed to. Pretty equals good. Ugly equals bad.”