Tyler woke up in the wee hours of the morning to the phone ringing insistently by his bed. He threw out a hand, knocked his alarm clock to the floor, and managed to slam his knuckles against the lamp. He cursed, opened his eyes, and finally located the phone. Only years of being a salesperson kept him from sounding exceedingly cranky when he managed to get out, “hello?”

“Tyler?”

Julia’s voice cut through Tyler’s head like nothing else could. He jerked upright in bed and had to silently remind himself to breathe. “Julia. What are you calling for?”

“I found a few of your things when I was unpacking in my apartment.” Julia sounded like she would have preferred to find Ebola in her boxes. “I need your address so that I can ship them to you.”

Tyler stared across the room at the blank white wall and tried to remember his address. “I-um-I don’t know the address off the top of my head. I’m using the mailbox at the end of the road. My parents used to use a post office box.” He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and stumbled out of bed. “Give me a second. I have the address in the kitchen somewhere.”

“Fine.” Julia’s voice was icy.

Tyler made it through the library and living room and into the kitchen without tripping over any of the boxes that were still packed up. He squinted at the clock in the kitchen and did a quick bit of subtraction in his head. “Why are you up at six in the morning?”

“I have things to do today.” Julia sounded completely disinterested in the whole conversation. “Shouldn’t you have been up and at an office of some sort by now?”

“I’m taking some time off, as you well know.” Tyler couldn’t help dropping every last ounce of concern or curiosity from his own voice. The best way to deal with Julia, he had discovered, was to stop caring whether or not he pissed her off intentionally. She was going to get mad at him for some inconsequential bit of nothing anyway. “How’s my alimony working out for you?”

“Your last check was late.”

“My accountant sends it off. Talk to him.”

“He’s an ass.”

~Why do you think he’s my accountant?~ Tyler rifled through a stack of papers on the edge of the kitchen table and cursed silently when he couldn’t find the paper where he’d scrawled the box address of the house. He took three steps to the counter and started digging through the papers there. “It’s here somewhere.”

“You never could keep track of anything.”

“Especially you.” Tyler has a quick memory flash of finding Julia at a restaurant where he was having a business dinner. She had been in the most basic idea of a dress and very tall shoes. The man she had been with had had watery eyes and looked overly frightened at the sight of Tyler stalking over to the table. There had been a very loud argument, and Tyler had gotten slapped. He’d retaliated by punching the watery-eyed coward in the nose. He’d been banned from the restaurant.

“Would you just find your address already?” Julia sounded like she was ready to crawl through the fiber optics of the phone and throttle Tyler. “I do have things to do today.”

“Congratulations.” Tyler finally saw the scrap of paper he was looking for and pumped his fist in the air before yanking it out from under a stack of bank records. “I’m at Box 248. Hugoton, Kansas.”

“Thank you.” Julia hung up the phone.

Tyler made a disgusted face and clicked off the cordless. “Why the hell did I ever marry you?” He dropped the phone onto the counter and decided, since he was up anyway, to start the day. He clicked on the coffee pot and walked back through the house to the bathroom. The pipes creaked when he went to crank on the hot water, and he made a mental note to get a plumber to the house to check things over. He’d moved into the house rather quickly, not really concerned with the pipes or the lights or heat as much as he was concerned with getting the hell away from Julia and San Francisco and the watery-eyed man that Julia had decided was a better match for her than Tyler.

The water finally warmed up, and Tyler got under the spray, making another mental note to buy a showerhead with some water pressure when he went into town that day. He stood under the spray for a few minutes and just let his head clear. He tried to remember when talking to Julia hadn’t left him feeling like he’d been beaten with a sock full of quarters, but he couldn’t honestly remember. A sudden, long note interrupted Tyler’s thoughts, and he cursed as he realized it was the doorbell. Too many years of being a salesman had him jumping from the shower and reaching for a towel before he had even registered that he was doing it. He spared a glance out the side window that gave a view of the driveway, but all he saw was a small purple truck that he didn’t recognize. The bell rang again, and he rolled his eyes.

“I’m coming!” He made sure his towel was secured around his waist and yanked open the front door. It took him a moment to realize that the person on the other side was Precocious. She didn’t seem to notice that he was, essentially, wet and naked.

“Morning.” She held up a small stack of files. “Zachary said that you were willing to look over some production numbers for him. He wanted me to explain the system to you. I reorganized it after Mrs. Slate left. Her system was…let’s just go with ‘unique’.” She smiled at Tyler and gave him a quick once-over. “This a bad time?”

Tyler wasn’t sure if she was smirking or not. If he were pressed for an answer, he’d say that she was. “I was in the shower,” he was tempted to kick himself for such a stupid answer, “obviously.” He stepped away from the door and gestured her in. “There’s coffee brewing in the kitchen. Help yourself. I’ll get finished up.”

“Want me to pour you a cup?”

“Please.” Tyler hurried back to the bathroom to dry off and get dressed. He wasn’t overly surprised to see himself flushed in the mirror. ~Zachary, I shall kill you dead.~ He had agreed to look over the production numbers as a favor and a way to burn some time, but he’d told Zachary that he’d handle it at the office with him. The idea of Precocious coming out to the farm hadn’t even been brought into the conversation. ~Should have known better than to take him at face value. Never trust a businessman. There's always a second face or a third face or a fourth face.~ Tyler threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and walked back to his kitchen. He gave a quick smile to Precocious. "Sorry about that."

"I've always had rotten timing." Precocious was busy pouring a great deal of milk into her coffee. She opened the drawer closest to her and closed it again. "Spoons?"

"Behind you." Tyler walked across the kitchen and retrieved a spoon from the silverware drawer. He handed it to Precocious and grabbed a mug from the drying rack to pour his own coffee. "I thought, when Zachary talked about my going over the numbers, that I'd be helping him at the office."

"We had a herd of inspectors from OSHA drop in this morning. You wouldn't even get to *see* Zachary, let alone sit in his office going over files. I know the system, I know the numbers we need to look at, so I offered to come out and run them by you."

Tyler gave Precocious a quick look. "How do you know so much about the company?"

"I'm the receptionist. I have to know everything on the off-chance some irate bastard calls and demands information from me. If I can't give it, I look like the weak link in the chain, and receptionists get a hard enough rap as it is." Precocious rolled her eyes. "Half the time I think people who come into the office expect me to have a beehive and a sweater set. I'd rather eat Napalm."

"Wow." Tyler walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. "That's harsh."

"It's true."

"Why not call yourself an 'administrative assistant'?"

"It gets the same reaction. Changing the name doesn't change the lack of respect for the job. It's why 'sanitation workers' still get shit. If it drives a big truck, hauls trash, and makes an obscene amount of money, it's a garbage man." Precocious sat next to Tyler and reached for the first file in the stack. "You want to get started?"

"Yeah."

Precocious opened the file and started explaining her system of organization to Tyler. That segued into the explanation on the numbers that Zachary was looking for, which turned into a conversation about which customers could be trusted to keep their orders at steady levels. Tyler was impressed with the sheer amount of knowledge that Precocious had for his questions. She had brought along a thick folder of customer information, but she did not consult for the entire session.

"Do you have a business degree?"

"Nope. No degree whatsoever."

Tyler watched her stand up and stretch, then pour another cup of coffee. "Did you go to college?"

"Briefly, but it wasn't for me. I'm not a particularly good student; I don’t have the patience to be taught how to do something in a classroom when I could learn it and have it be useful in the workplace."

"What about advancement?"

Precocious shrugged. "What about it?" She looked very unimpressed. "I like my life. I like my job. I like my boss. I've been assured by Zachary that not only will I be allowed to maintain my job for as long as possible, but that if I want advancement, he's willing to consider it. It sure as hell beats having a job that I'd get the shaft at because I'm not a formal education type person."

"Get that from your hippie mother?" Tyler grinned a little to show that he was joking.

"You'd think so. It's very anti-establishment to not go into formal education. No, Mom's all about education in any sense. She's got her masters, and she's working on her doctorate.”