shoulder blades of the blue scrubs in front of me. I just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Could not accept my gilded lot. Could not turn this unearned Schuyler privilege into the least necessary degree of satisfaction.
And less satisfied by the moment, really, as the clock counted down to quitting time and the clerks showed no signs of hurry and the line showed no sign of advancing. The foot-shifting began. The man behind me swore and lit a cigarette. Someone let loose a theatrical sigh. I inched my nose a little deeper toward the olfactory oasis of the blue scrubs, because this man at least smelled of disinfectant instead of piss, and blond was my favorite color.
A customer left the counter. The first man in line launched himself toward the clerk. The rest of us took a united step forward.
Except the man in blue scrubs. His brown leather feet remained planted, but I realized this only after I’d thrust myself into the center of his back and knocked him right smack down to the stained linoleum.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, holding out my hand. He looked up at me and blinked, like my childhood dog Quincy used to do when roused unexpectedly from his after-breakfast beauty snooze. “My word. Were you asleep?”
He ignored my hand and rose to his feet. “Looks that way.”
“I’m very sorry. Are you all right?”
“Yes, thanks.” That was all. He turned and faced front.
Well, I would have dropped it right there, but the man was eye-wateringly handsome, stop-in-your-tracks handsome, Paul Newman handsome, sunny blue eyes and sunny blond hair, and this was New York, where you took your opportunities wherever you found them. “Ah. You must be an intern or a resident, or whatever they are. Saint Vincent’s, is it? I’ve heard they keep you poor boys up three days at a stretch. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes.” Taciturn. But he was blushing, right the way up his sweet sunny neck.
“Unless you’re narcoleptic,” I went on. “It’s fine, really. You can admit it. My second cousin Richard was like that. He fell asleep at his own wedding, right there at the altar. The organist was so rattled she switched from the Wedding March to the Death March.”
The old pregnant pause. Someone stifled a laugh behind me. I thought I’d overplayed my hand, and then:
“He did not.”
Nice voice. Sort of Bing Crosby with a bass chord.
“Did too. We had to sprinkle him with holy water to wake him up, and by sprinkle I mean tip-turn the whole basin over his head. He’s the only one in the family to have been baptized twice.”
The counter shed two more people. We were cooking now. I glanced at the lopsided black-and-white clock on the wall: two minutes to twelve. Blue Scrubs still wasn’t looking at me, but I could see from his sturdy jaw—lanterns, psht—he was trying very hard not to smile.
“Hence his nickname, Holy Dick,” I said.
“Give it up, lady,” muttered the man behind me.
“And then there’s my aunt Mildred. You can’t wake her up at all. She settled in for an afternoon nap once and didn’t come downstairs again until bridge the next day.”
No answer.
“So, during the night, we switched the furniture in her room with the red bordello set in the attic,” I said, undaunted. “She was so shaken, she led an unsupported ace against a suit contract.”
The neck above the blue scrubs was now as red as tomato bisque, minus the oyster crackers. He lifted one hand to his mouth and coughed delicately.
“We called her Aunt van Winkle.”
The shoulder blades shivered.
“I’m just trying to tell you, you have no cause for embarrassment for your little disorder,” I said. “These things can happen to anyone.”
“Next,” said a counter clerk, eminently bored.
Blue Scrubs leapt forward. My time was up.
I looked regretfully down the row of counter stations and saw, to my dismay, that all except one were now fronted by malicious little engraved signs reading COUNTER CLOSED.
The one man remaining—other than Blue Scrubs, who was having a pair of letters weighed for air mail, not that I was taking note of any details whatsoever—stood fatly at the last open counter, locked in a spirited discussion with the clerk regarding his proficiency with brown paper and Scotch tape.
Man (affectionately): YOU WANT I SHOULD JUMP THE COUNTER AND BREAK YOUR KNEECAPS, GOOBER?
Clerk (amused): YOU WANT I SHOULD CALL THE COPS, MORON?
I checked my watch. One minute to go. Behind me, I heard people sighing and breaking away, the weighty doors opening and closing, the snatches of merciless October rain on the sidewalk.
Ahead, the man threw up his hands, grabbed back his ramshackle package, and stormed off.
I took a step. The clerk stared at me, looked at the clock, and took out a silver sign engraved COUNTER CLOSED.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
The clerk smiled, tapped his watch, and walked away.
“Excuse me,” I called out, “I’d like to see the manager. I’ve been waiting here for ages, I have a very urgent parcel—”
The clerk turned his head. “It’s noon, lady. The post office is closed. See you Monday.”
“I will not see you Monday. I demand my parcel.”
“Do you want me to call the manager, lady?”
“Yes. Yes, I should very much like you to call the manager. I should very much—”
Blue Scrubs looked up from his air-mail envelopes. “Excuse me.”
I planted my hands on my hips. “I’m terribly sorry to disturb the serenity of your transaction, sir, but some of us aren’t lucky enough to catch the very last post-office clerk before the gong sounds at noon. Some of us are going to have to wait until Monday morning to receive our rightful parcels—”
“Give it a rest, lady,” said the clerk.
“I’m not going to give it a rest. I pay my taxes. I buy my stamps and lick them myself, God help me. I’m not going to stand for this kind of lousy service, not for a single—”
“That’s it,” said the clerk.
“No, that’s not it. I haven’t even started—”
“Look here,” said Blue Scrubs.
I turned my head. “You stay out of this, Blue Scrubs. I’m trying to conduct a perfectly civilized argument with a perfectly uncivil post-office employee—”
He cleared his Bing Crosby throat. His eyes matched his scrubs, too blue to be real. “I was only going to say, it seems there’s been a mistake made here. This young lady was ahead of me in line. I apologize, Miss …”
“Schuyler,” I whispered.
“… Miss Schuyler, for being so very rude as to jump in front of you.” He stepped back from the counter and waved me in.
And then he smiled, all crinkly and Paul Newman, and I could have sworn a little sparkle flashed out from his white teeth.
“Since you put it that way,” I said.
“I do.”
I drifted past him to the counter and held out my card. “I think I have a parcel.”
“You think you have a parcel?” The clerk smirked.
Yes. Smirked. At me.
Well! I shook the card at his post-office smirk, nice