The next morning Ellis Mercer was already at the counter when I arrived, sorting through a stack of service complaint forms with the quick, competent motions of a man who'd been doing the same task for a decade. Ellis had covered three of my sick days that winter without being asked twice, and I owed him more goodwill than I usually admitted.
"Clearing out February," he said, not looking up. "You believe this pile? Six of them this month alone. People complaining the file requests never got processed, records never mailed out, the usual."
I leaned against the counter beside him. "Six seems like a lot."
"It's not as bad as it looks." He folded the sheets in half, one by one, with the particular care of someone performing a task he wanted finished rather than examined. "Most of it's dates. People file a complaint, then the thing resolves itself a week later and nobody tells us."
"You're forwarding them to Celia?"
"Once I check the dates against the log," he said. "No sense sending her six complaints if four of them are already moot." He slid the folded sheets into a manila envelope and set it on the shelf behind the counter, the shelf we both used for things waiting on a second look.
I thought about the monthly summary I'd typed up two days earlier, the one Celia had already initialed and sent upstairs, the one that read complaints resolved during reporting period: none outstanding. I'd typed that line from the log Ellis kept, trusting the log the way you trust a clock that's always kept good time before.
"The summary already says nothing's outstanding," I said. It wasn't quite a question.
"It will be true by the time anyone reads it twice," Ellis said, and smiled in a way that made the sentence sound reasonable rather than strange. "I'll have it sorted by Friday. You know how it goes this time of year."
I did know how it went this time of year — backlog everywhere, everyone covering for everyone else, the whole building running on the accumulated trust of people who didn't have time to verify each other's work. It was how the office had always functioned, long before Conn's name was in the paper, and it had never once failed me.
"All right," I said, and went back to my own counter, where a line had formed. I left the six folded sheets in Ellis's care, relieved to have accepted an explanation that required nothing further of me just then. I had my own complaints to manage — people furious about delayed mail, about fees they didn't expect, about a bureaucracy that moved slower than their patience. Ellis's envelope was his business, I told myself, and I was glad, in a tired way, not to have more of it be mine.
Before I could turn away, a man at my window pushed a request slip under the opening and asked whether paying for a copy meant he would actually receive it. I checked his slip against the entries available to me. There was a request recorded, but no notation that the copy had been sent. Behind me, Ellis began gathering the loose papers from the shelf.
"Can you tell him when?" Ellis asked.
"Not from this," I said. The man watched my hands as though an answer might be folded inside the slip. I wanted to give him something better than another instruction to wait, but there was nothing on the page to support a date. I wrote down what I had checked and told him what still needed an answer. He took the slip without thanking me.
When the window cleared, I reached for a blank forwarding cover. "You could send the six with a note that the dates are unconfirmed," I told Ellis.
"And make six loose ends look like six failures? Let me check first." He tapped the envelope against the counter until its edges were square. "Would you want somebody sending your unfinished work upstairs?"
That question had an answer I could give without examining anything. I put the blank cover back. Ellis slid the envelope farther onto the shelf, clear of the daily requests, and I accepted the distinction he had made between work not finished and work not worth reporting.