One new hope, and the empire strikes back

"Hi, Renshu. I hope I didn't scare you."
"What are you doing here?" I pinched my arm under my sleeve to make sure she was actually real. "How did you--" I broke off. What I had been about to ask was "How did you find me?," which, I realized, was stupid. I was in exactly the same place as before.

"Well," Nova started, "After college, I went to med school, and since then I've been on-and-off searching for jobs. I'm a doctor now, but I have nowhere to be."
"This is the post office." I wasn't even sure myself whether I was bitter or confused.
"After my last small job, and because of some other circumstances, I thought I'd come back and see if I couldn't find work in my old hometown."
I stared at her. "You're a doctor." Wow, I was just full of intelligence. I'd lost all my charm to fifteen years of time.
"Yeah," she said, "but I was also curious. I wanted to see what had happened to you."
She motioned towards the door. I locked up the post office and we started walking.
How embarrassing that I was doing the exact same thing as when she'd left? Raising a daughter and working at the post office? I had to justify this somehow.
"Well, I'm the postmaster now," I said. "After fifteen years of service as a regular old mailman."
She grinned. "I was half expecting that you wouldn't even be here, and that you'd have gone off to college after all and become a writer like you wanted to be."
Had I wanted to be a writer? Ah, youth. Ugh, memory.
Here I was, thirty-three and single, in almost the exact same situation that Nova had left me in.
Suddenly I felt self-conscious about my appearance for the first time in forever. Did I still have feelings for her? I tried to search myself and figure that out, but I couldn't tell. She was as beautiful as ever, despite the faint lines on her face that hadn't been there in her teenage years, but I seemed to have lost my feelings-for-people muscles gradually over more than a decade. I didn't love her. I wasn't sure whether that was relieving or saddening.

Nova used to be scrawny in high school. She had filled out a bit, although not to the point of being plump. And she hadn't gotten that extra inch of height after all. We were still eye-to-eye.

We were gradually walking towards Castle Apartments. I wanted to ask her more about her life, but her brief doctor story seemed to be all that she was interested in telling me. Awkwardly, I ventured, "Do you need a place to stay until you can find a job? There's a clinic here in town, I can take you there in the morning."
I was worried that she'd read mixed signals in my innocent statement, but she smiled. "Thanks, Renshu. That'd be wonderful, but I didn't want to ask. And yeah, I can go to the clinic in the morning."
We didn't say much for the rest of the walk. Or maybe we did, but I just didn't remember. The whole thing was eerie. My arm hurt from pinching myself, and I almost expected her to disappear or take off and fly away.
Betwixt my wandering thoughts, I had absentmindedly reached for her hand. Old habits really do die hard. I brushed her pinky and we both jerked our hands away as if we'd been shocked. Awkward, Renshu...

A few minutes later, I walked into the apartment followed closely by Nova. I walked around the corner and found Xiu Li making pasta in the kitchen. I pretended like this was completely normal. "Dad!" said Xiu Li, and I realized that I hadn't called her about being late.
But I didn't have time to explain anything, because Xiu Li saw Nova first.
"DAD!" she yelled. "Who the hell is in our apartment!?"
God, I didn't know what I had been expecting, but that wasn't it.
"Be nice, Xiu Li!" I retorted.
"Oh, that's great. Bring a girl home. You could've warned me!" She was furious. I was so confused.
"This is Nova. She was my high school girlfriend." I paused. "You've actually met before."
Xiu Li eyed her suspiciously. This was going to be a long evening, I thought.
"I don't believe you," she said, less confidently, and sat down in a chair.
Then, for the first time, she addressed Nova directly.
"Like Supernova?"
I couldn't believe I'd never told Xiu Li about Nova, but she was being obnoxious on purpose and I didn't like it.

Thankfully, Nova seemed not to mind so much.
"That's original," she snapped, but she was smiling.
"If you're going to have sex with my dad, you will have to go somewhere else."
Xiu Li seemed determined to out-bitch my ex-girlfriend. I'd forgotten over the past few days (what with her sulking) just how sharptongued she could be. I worried for a second that Nova would think badly of me, but realized I didn't have to care.
"I'm thirty-three, little miss," said Nova, who was grinning widely. "I'll fornicate wherever I please, thanks."
I tried to interrupt, but it was poorly timed and overly forced. "Nova's a doctor. She's here looking for a job."
"There's a lovely place called Isabella's Cafe down the street," said Xiu Li, without missing a beat, "although you may have trouble getting above minimum wage with those legs of yours."
I instinctively looked down, and then felt embarrassed. Nova was too busy verbally abusing my daughter, though.
"You seem to have quite a bit of knowledge about the establishment," she said coolly.
Then I watched in awe as the two of them struck up a conversation about law enforcement.
They chatted for a long time, and I drained the pasta.
We sat down to eat, and I tried three times before succeeding in rejoining the conversation.

Nova was talking about me. "Well," she said, "I'm not saying I wish I'd kept your father around--" I scoffed, not sure whether or not that was supposed to be an actual insult-- "but my now ex-husband was really a tool."
She'd been married?!
"Do tell," said Xiu Li, sprinkling parmesan cheese over the noodles.
"Well, he and I had different definitions of acceptable married behavior. For instance, he preferred to go elsewhere to satisfy his sexual needs. Specifically, as I discovered, to my former college roommate."
"You say 'well' a lot," noted Xiu Li. "But seriously, dude, that does suck."
"How long has it been?" I asked.
"Three years," she said. "Why do you ask?"
I must have turned a fascinating shade of red. Xiu Li kicked me and said, "Nice going, Dad."

She was starting to piss me off a bit. My high school girlfriend had appeared at the apartment, and I was the odd one out.
Xiu Li had started talking about her own social problems. "My best friend was caught living in electrical tunnels under the city," she piped up. "Then the police took her away and I hired a detective."
I had to interrupt.
"You did what?"
"Hired a detective. Me and Arjun."
Who the hell was Arjun?
"Arjun and me," said Nova.
Xiu Li flipped her off and kept talking. "He said he'd look for her." She shoveled a huge bite of pasta into her mouth and stopped speaking.
"Where do you find detectives these days, anyway?" said Nova.
"Antique shops," said Xiu Li, after finishing chewing.

The conversation continued for only a couple minutes longer before Xiu Li announced that she was going to bed, got up from the table, and headed into her room.
Nova stared after her, then back at me, and then at the shut door to Xiu Li's bedroom.
"Your daughter," she said, "is amazing."
I couldn't have been more caught off guard. "What?"
"Incredible," echoed Nova.
"That's not exactly the word I would've used. I'm going to have to talk to her later. She took a huge risk, not knowing you and talking to you like that."
"She knew I could handle it," said Nova. She smirked at me.
"She's a lot like you in some ways, Renshu."
I stared at my shoes for a second.
"I guess that'd be an argument for nurture, then." Nova laughed.
"You know," she mused, "I didn't know if you'd still be here. In town, I mean. I figured you would've up and left. And now you're a postmaster, of all things, and Xiu Li is fifteen years old."

For a split second, I remembered my baby's cries on the baby monitor after Nova hung up on me for the last time.

You'll be thirty-six when she goes to college...


"She's going to college in three years," I said, thinking out loud. "So I'm thirty-three."
She clearly didn't remember the phone call as vividly as I did, so I dropped it.
There was a pause for a minute.

"This is really weird," I said. Nova smiled. "Yeah. It is."
"I should go to bed," I decided aloud, breaking the silence.

I helped Nova set up the couch to sleep on, and warned her about the imminent Banging of Pipes in the morning. She clearly didn't know what I meant. I chuckled to myself as I walked back to my room. She'd know soon enough.

As I undressed and lay down on my bed, I thought about the odd events of the day.

November Murphy. Here. Talking to my daughter and sleeping on my couch. Thirty-three, just like me.
I dozed off.

* * *

By the time I woke up, Nova had been awake for a good while, sitting up angrily on the couch. I had, as it seemed, built a mild tolerance to the pipe banging, but she was a novice.
"Can we just get out of here?" she yelled as I entered the room in my pajamas.
I had planned to take a shower, but I threw on an old T-shirt and some sweatpants and descended the stairs with her, leaving Xiu Li asleep in the apartment.

As planned, we headed straight for the clinic. I let Nova do most of the talking, and she quickly located the woman she needed to talk to, whose name was Clara Kate. After they chatted for a bit and I once again felt awkward, Nova reassured me that she was fine and that I could go home.

I went back up to the apartment, took a quick shower, and left for work.

Bill, Curt, and Marjorie all showed up punctually, fifteen minutes after I did. I was hoping that the system would work just as well as it had yesterday. Even better.

Curt and Marjorie loaded up with the day's mail and left in their respective trucks on their respective routes. Bill took a seat at the front desk and took a couple of phone calls. Meanwhile, I searched through the phone book for a plumber, because the post office bathroom was, well, shitty.

Suddenly, I was interrupted from looking at ads by Bill yelling from the next room. I ran in to see what was going on, and he handed me the phone. "I didn't answer it yet," he hissed, "but I have to go to the bathroom."
Before I could tell him to beware of the mens' toilets, he was off, and I put the phone to my ear.
Almost immediately, I realized that the noise I'd just heard was the second half of the word 'hello.'"
"Yes," I said confidently. "This is, uh, the post office. How may I help you?"
I was terrible at this secretary thing.

"Well, uh," said the female voice on the other end, "I don't know how to really say this, but do you perhaps... have an Asian mailman? Working for you? I'm sorry, I'm not being racist or anything, I just don't know how else to describe him..." She babbled on for a good bit, talking almost too fast to be understandable. Apparently she was the girl from Forever 21 who I'd given a ferry ride in my cart. God, that seemed like ages ago.
Just to be sure, I asked her if that's who she was, and thank goodness, she said yes. That could've been much worse.
She kept trying to thank me, but I just wanted to get back to the phone book. What was the point of her call, anyway?
"If that's all you had to say..." I began, but she interrupted me.
"Oh, no!" she said quickly. "I actually also wanted to ask you if I could possibly get a job there, you know, since my work place burned down."
That was actually enormously helpful, much as she was annoying me.
"Hmmm," I said, half-sarcastically. "Let me think about it. Are you good at typing?"
Here I was playing hard to get on a potential employee. Pathetic.
"Yes!"
"What about filing?"
"I'm pretty efficient," she said excitedly.
"What about taking calls?" I didn't want to have to take any more of those, that was for sure.
"Did it all the time at Forever 21," said... was her name Eli?... offhandedly.
"Alright," I said, and I told her I'd call back later.
After talking to a plumber on the phone for a little while, I decided there was no point postponing it, and I did call her back.

I told her she could have the job working the front desk, starting tomorrow. She started to thank me, but I managed to cut her short.
I laughed when I finally hung up. "Talkative?" said Bill.
"You bet," I said, still chuckling.
We started talking idly as I puttered around the office, trying to find things to do.
Not to be sexist, but despite being male, Bill was very much a secretary. He was interesting and easy to communicate with. He also loved to talk, though not quite as much as Miss Rosenthal from Forever 21.

Bill, as he told me, had a wife and twin seven-year-olds. I thought of Xiu Li at seven and laughed uproariously at that. "God, twins!" I exclaimed. "That'd be hell. Mine's enough of a handful."
"Daughter or son?"
"Daughter. She's fifteen."
"More power to you," he said. "I couldn't abide all that teen stuff. And will you look at this! You, so much younger than me, and with a daughter eight years older than mine. How old are you, anyway?"
I ignored the question.
"You think that's crazy," I told him. "My high school girlfriend showed up at the post office last night at closing time and then came home and slept on my freaking couch."
Bill's eyes bugged slightly.
"Whoa, Renshu, that's intense! What's she doing here?"

"I'm not exactly sure," I said. "She came looking for a job-- she's a doctor-- so I connected her with the clinic. I'm not sure if she's coming back to stay with us tonight or not.
"Not to pry," said Bill, "but... you still got feelings for..."
"Nova?" I contributed. "Well, she's still beautiful. But that's stupid, man. I mean, this isn't some stupid fairy tale." I laughed at myself and my hipster phrasing. "She's a doctor, and I'm a..." I stopped myself. "Postmaster."
"That's not what I asked, Renshu. Do you still love the girl?"
I thought about it.
I tried to remember back in high school when I'd wake up on the weekends to her nose brushing mine, where she'd climbed in through the window the night before. The way she looked when the wind blew her hair all over her face and she started laughing through all of it. She was stunning, all the time, and people were jealous of me, all the time.
I thought again.
But I didn't want to marry her. In hindsight, I never would've.
She'd dumped me as soon as she'd had the slightest reason. And it's not like we'd kept in touch after that.

The spark was gone. I didn't even know her anymore.
"No," I said definitively.
Bill looked at me and decided I was telling the truth.
We worked around more on a computer bug that had come up that morning.

Three people came in to mail packages, which I realized hadn't happened in DuBolaire's time. Apparently people had been going to the next town over rather than deal with this office. I swelled with pride over the reputation we were getting.

After lunch, Marjorie and Curt arrived back at the office within five minutes of each other, and I called a quick meeting.
"We're going to have a girl named..." I paused, searching my memory again. "Eli Rosenthal, I think. She's going to be our front desk girl." They all nodded at me. "After that, we just need one more person to work for the front desk and maybe one more mail route, and I think we should be able to cover the town effectively, at least for now. We're doing great."
They were all smiling. Marjorie gave Curt a high five, and I took a double take before going on.
"But we're still really in debt here, and it's hard to recover from that in the electronic age, where no one sends letters except grandmothers and liberal arts colleges."
"Amen," joked Bill.
"We need more people wanting to send packages and letters," I finished, and made a decision on the spot. I felt proud that I could do that now with my manager position. "This afternoon, I'll head over to the neighboring town and ask about mailing packages. Maybe they'd be willing to negotiate a deal on distributing customers and maybe delivery routes."

With that, the three of them left fairly promptly, leaving me Googling how to get to the next closest post office. It turned out to be only a block from one of the bus stops, which was incredibly convenient with my lack of car. I walked over to the bus stop and waited for a bit.

After the bus arrived and I got on, I realized how long it'd been since I'd actually broken out of my routine. It was really kind of sad. I vowed that I would leave town more often. Maybe I'd take Xiu Li to the beach or something. But my bus had already reached the stop.

It didn't take me long to find the neighboring post office. It was much bigger than ours, and as I walked in, I could tell immediately that they had tons more employees than we'd ever had. I walked up to one woman at random. "Can I help you?" she said, with the tone of one who hopes your answer is no.
"I'd like to speak to the manager," I said. She gave me quite a look.
"You have a complaint or something?"
I wanted to reply that yeah, that's why I was wearing a mail jacket, but I refrained. Finally, after a minute of polite dispute, she finally let me go without helping me. I walked up to another employee, determined to succeed in my quest.
"Hey," I said, half-hoping he'd think I was another employee. "Can you go get the postmaster?"
I hadn't fooled the guy.
"Are you positive you want to talk to him? He's new. No one really likes him."
"I'm very sure," I said.
"Fine," said the guy indifferently. He showed me to a small area with chairs, next to the door of the postmaster's office.
And I sat down.
And I sat.
And I sat.
Half an hour passed very quickly, to my surprise. It had been almost 38 minutes when I heard the manager walk out of the office over my shoulder.
I stood up, pretending like I hadn't been sitting long, and turned around to shake his hand
"Hi," I started. "My name is Renshu Zheng, and I'm the postmaster from the next town east..."
I trailed off.

Dammit.

Mr. DuBolaire smirked at me.
"That was a lovely introduction, but maybe you should just cut straight to the chase."
My blood boiled.
"You look like a squinting ape with your mouth hanging open like that, Renshu," he said calmly.
"You're a crook," I hissed, with that clever wit I've always had.
"How about we chat in my office?" he demanded, and much to my great anger, steered me over the threshold into the room.
Once he'd shut the door, his phony smile vanished completely.
"What are you doing here, Renshu?"
I decided that I was here on business and business was business.
"I was trying to see if we could negotiate an agreement between the two offices as to where our routes stop and start, and maybe alert some people to the existence of my location."
I knew it was futile before I even finished talking.
"Well," said the gel-haired embodiment of Satan, "I think maybe you should take your business somewhere else." He stood up and began to pace around his desk.

"Does the USPS know how far in debt you are? Careful. They may just decide to close your office and make mine the cover for your town as well." I stood up, glaring. He continued hurriedly.
"If you want to keep your job, maybe you should leave before someone calls and complains about your complete lack of finances," he said.
I was fuming. I'd thought this man was out of my life, and now he was blackmailing me with the problem he created. How had this happened? What was Mr. DuBolaire even trying to do?
"Did you privatize this office, too?" I asked coldly.
"Oh no, there's no need to. I don't intend to ruin this one. I intend to move up the ladder. And I have my ways of getting control."
He opened the door. "Thank you for your offer, Mr. Zheng, but I think our office is fine in its current state of things. Have a nice day."

I walked as rudely as I could out of his office, hoping that wouldn't be enough to trigger a certain kind of phone call. I stalked off down the block, only to discover I'd missed my bus. I called Xiu Li to warn her, but I ended up having to wait until after dark.

I had a lot to think about when I got home.