The day she left her keys on the counter at the Stuyvesant Post Office was not the first time he'd seen her. He had, in fact, watched her carefully for three months. It wasn't perverted, obsessional curiosity that compelled him to note each detail of her movements as she collected her mail. It was simply in his nature to observe. Three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) Steve Dant waited on the long post office line that snaked between frayed, dirty ropes in a complicated figure S. The line inched forward toward the three service windows. The clerks had long ago mastered the art of looking busy while doing almost nothing. They shuffled and stamped papers behind their grates and tossed priority mail packages into different bins in slow motion as the people on line shifted from one foot to the other and the tendons in their necks rose out of the skin and pulsated very slightly. Steve did not share their impatience. The post office line marked the end of his work day and he used it as a cool down period. It was his equivalent of happy hour, a time to slowly unwind in a crowd of strangers. He pushed his box of "outgoing" mail along with his foot and enjoyed the spectacle. Hispanic women yanked their children along by their frail little arms and talked in loud voices in a language he didn't understand, despite three years of high school Spanish and two trips to Mexico. Aged Eastern European women with swollen legs and sunken mouths clutched letters in lightweight airmail envelopes, complicated addresses scrawled across the front. Tired looking interns in white jackets fiddled with the stethoscopes hanging around their necks. It was like a movie, Steve often thought, some art movie that didn't have an obvious, recognizable plot.