That Monday he'd met the rest of the staff: John, the word processor, was a part timer, and Mary Anne, Janet's right hand, proofread and did all the accounting. Steve's modest duties included Xeroxing, sweeping, running errands, picking up the mail, and sending the magazine out to subscribers. Hence, his visits to the post office. He usually hit it around 4:15 and he wasn't really expected back in the office, though occasionally he returned for the last fifteen minutes of the work day. He'd noticed the woman who left her keys on the counter at the end of his first week on the job. She seemed to ride in from 14th Street on a dark cloud, and then move like a streak toward the postal boxes that lined the eastern wall of the lobby. She was tall, perhaps 5'10", and her stride was long and smooth, despite her calf-length motorcycle boots and tight black stretch-skirt. There was a kind of precision to her, a single-pointedness that cleared a natural path. No one stepped in front of her. The woman squatted down to fit her key into a box on the second to bottom row. She pulled out a single letter and stuffed her key ring, which appeared to Steve, twenty feet away on the line, to be a bright pink golf ball, into the pocket of her denim jacket and dropped her huge leather bag off her shoulder onto the floor between her feet. She slid her finger under the flap of the envelope and pulled out a hand-written letter. The line shifted forward one person, and Steve moved with it, but his attention remained fixed on the woman, on the way she leaned against the mail boxes, effectively blocking one entire vertical row, while her eyes, brown like the hair that was piled on top of her head and tied with a black scarf, darted across line after line, down the page. She turned the letter over and read the last paragraph on the back. Then she tore it to bits and dumped it in the garbage can as she sailed out, shifting her sunglasses down off her head over her eyes. "Move it up, bud," a voice behind him said. The person in front of him had made the final turn and was a full three feet closer to the windows. Steve quickly pushed his box of mail along the floor and fought off the urge to apologize to the group. Why should it make them so nervous, he wondered, if he didn't step forward the exact second it became possible? What unrelenting chaos could his slow response time unleash?