A Lady in Waiting 3

Rebecca wasn’t one of those bored flirty women.
She might have been, but it would have taken entirely too much effort to be somebody she wasn’t. Growing up in rural Tennessee, she did what most country girls did, but wasn’t pretty enough to get that many dates. Not homely, just no sparkle. On a whim, when a public school exam pegged her as talented in whatever incomprehensible skills and character traits government bureaucracies were seeking, she took a job offer at some big welfare office off in the city as mail clerk. That led to data entry, then some advancement courses, and so forth. When other jobs opened up, if one seemed half-way interesting, she grabbed it. She moved across the country several times and never saw much of her home state again, though she carried that rural Tennessee drawl wherever she went.
She was never really ambitious, never really qualified for big promotions, always hitting that solid middle level of management everywhere she went. Somehow, she found herself assigned some nebulous job as Community Coordinator on this God-forsaken installation. She laughingly called her office Gossip Central, since it seemed little more than that in terms of how it actually operated. In the typical fulfillment of bureaucratic requirements, written by a string of people who had never done any similar work at any time in their lives, and approved by officials who didn’t in the least care what it was really all about, she had all the hassles of any other bureaucrat in any other office and really didn’t have to do a darn thing that mattered.
But that would have been against her conscience, so she did what little she could to bless people with some sense of community and belonging informally. All the other stuff associated with her job was simply justification for paying her. Everyone liked her but no one really loved her.
It’s not as if she never dated anyone; she was no virgin. She had been burned enough times in romance to be very cautious because she knew she had none of the assets and talents as the flirty bunch. Like most women, she worked out in the gym out of sheer boredom, so had to listen to a lot of the sort of women’s locker-room gossip she found wholly distasteful. Her reaction wasn’t prudish and she sometimes wished she had some tales of her own. Not that she would ever tell anyone if she did. Maybe a couple of pals, but this was during a time in the natural bureaucratic rhythm of life when she had no close friends, no confidants.
Completely by accident she was the one person on the installation who actually knew something about the new guy. It was simply her job. In the routine procedures of taking his place on the installation, he had to visit her office so she could run through her official spiel. Perhaps it was entirely random, but in the long list of offices he had to visit during in-processing, he came to hers almost last.