The middle aged red haired female receptionist smiled politely at the petite brunette haired younger woman. "Of course, Miss Chirikova. Doctor Valkonan told me that she was expecting you today. You go down that hall, and her office is the last one at the end of the hall." Phyllia pointed the way with her ball point pen.

Then she turned to answer the buzzing phone with the grace of a duchess. "Good morning, Riverview Clinic. Please give the name of the department or person whom you wish to speak with."

When she took over as the Director of Riverview Clinic four years ago, Maranya Tatiana Valkonan maintained an open door policy for her employees. Therefore, her door remained a symbolic crack open at all times. She continued the policy when she shifted downward in the bureaucratic hierarchy to Chief of Staff earlier in the year, and renewed it when she reassumed the burden of Directorship once again in early March.

Hazel eyes, shielded behind tortoiseshell reading glasses lenses, studied the stacks of computer printouts, spreadsheets, and other forms of paperwork that littered her otherwise pristine cherry wood desk.

By the Beyond, this paperwork multiplies like Tribbles every day. If this keeps up, I'm going to be hip deep in it by Friday at the outside.

She looked up from the paperwork toward the door at the triplet of knocks. A smile lit her features.

Help at last!

"Privyet! Come in, Xenia."

Maranya smiled with relief. "Of course. Pull up a chair, and you can begin by going through this stack of files."

She held out a paper ream's worth of printouts for Xenia to take. "Sort these according to the color tags, please. Anything red tagged goes into one pile, blue tags another, so on, and so forth. If a file has more than one color tag, sort it into the pile with the highest color tag. Red's the highest, followed by green, then blue, and finally black. But first"."

Maranya set the pile back down on her desk, and turned in her swivel chair to pour a large mug of WonderCoffee from the coffee maker by her desk. Then she offered it out to Xenia. "You're going to need this. Cream, sugar?"

Maranya nodded, and set the mug aside to drink later herself. "Well, I am definitely a cafe drinker. Especially when it comes to wending my way through this pile of paperwork."

Not one to give her staff work that she wasn't willing to do herself, for the most part, she took up her own ream sized stack of printouts, and began the tedious process of sorting the tagged files into priority piles.

"Do you prefer chaj then" My father took his with white cherry preserves while he reviewed his case files in his office at home. He was a physician, too," she mused with a wistful tone to her voice that perfectly matched her expression.

Maranya looked up from her sorting to check on Xenia's progress, and nodded in approval. "I get pastries delivered here daily from a local bakery. They're quite good, and their raspberry strudel is excellent. Is there any particular type of pastry or sweet that you like" I can see if Ariana makes it, and have it added to the daily delivery for you."

"Da, I miss Papa very much," Maranya admitted wistfully, appreciating Xenia's sympathy. "But, I feel that he is looking over my shoulder, and approves, for the most part, my choices in life." Her hazel gaze turned downward for a moment, to the emerald that gleamed in its platinum setting on her left ring finger.

"I do know that Papa approves of me being a doktor. He smiled so big when I was accepted into the same medical school that he graduated from, Dagestan State Medical Academy, that I thought his face would split in two. Of course, I was only fourteen at the time, which made his vest buttons strain even more with pride."

Her gaze turned wistful once more. "He never saw me graduate. My Papa, Mama, and my brother Andy all died in a house fire, on my sixteenth birthday."

Maranya shook her head to disrupt that thought loop before it became firmly entrenched, and focused on the more pleasant ones which involved the sweet treats. "Oh, prianiki! I haven't had those for years, myself. Those are definitely going to be added to the next order."

She offered out a plate of bite sized strudel bites filled with raspberries to her assistant. "I can see that we will get along very well, after all, Xenia, as I favor raspberries too."

Maranya nodded in grateful acknowledgment of Xenia's sympathetic gestures. "Spasibo. They are, but, still, I would have liked for Papa to meet 'Tonio and Alper. He would have liked them both. They are professional men, like Papa was."

Perhaps it was the soft cadence of Xenia's voice, the particular way her accent shaped certain words, which had Riverview's Chief of Staff continue to reminisce about her youth when she went back to the tedious task of sorting the printouts in front of her. "Andy and I used to have" mm, not exactly fights, per se, but strong verbal disagreements over which was better, borsh' with or without sour cream on top of it. Andy was of the firm opinion that one must never taint borsh' with sour cream, and I love it with a dollop. To this day, I can still hear my brother's voice scolding me whenever I dare to dollop."

The soft rustle of papers as they were moved from one pile to another harmonized with Maranya's equally soft laughter. "Bozhe moi, Xenia! I don't dare bake. Not unless I want to draw with the results. Mama used to make the most wonderful cookies; she called them utes, because they looked like rocks before you baked them"." Her voice trailed off at the sound of her assistant's choked laughter. "Is something wrong?"

The mischievous twinkle in Maranya's hazel eyes was undimmed by the lenses of her reading glasses while she continued to sort the printouts into their designated piles on her desk. "I imagine you and tvoy brat got into quarrels over borsh', too, da?" She shook her head, and gratefully smiled. "I would definitely appreciate the lessons, spasibo. Rosalie has been trying" in vain, I might add? to teach me the finer points of baking for a while now. While I can pound bread dough very nicely, sometimes, it ends up being focaccia instead of a proper loaf when I get through with it," she admitted ruefully.

She handed over another ream thick stack of tagged printouts to her diligent assistant. "Once we get these all sorted according to color, each stack will need to be sorted into alphabetical order by last name or, if they only have one name listed, the name on file." Her nose wrinkled like she got a whiff of over boiled cabbage at the prospect of more sorting. "Tedious, I know, but it makes things easier in the long run."

Laughter, rich and full, escaped from Maranya with her assistant's comment about baking. "Da, it does, Xenia. Unfortunately, when I don't think, I forget about what?s in the oven, and poof! That's when I end up creating charcoal. I have ruined far too many pans of brownies alone to count. The smell of burnt chocolate" meh, that's one that lingers for a while."

Her brows furrowed in consideration for a few moments. "More than one name" mm, let's make those a separate pile as well for now." Then she nodded in agreement. "Da, it could always be worse. We could be manning the main switchboard, for one." She visibly shuddered as if overtaken by a sudden chill at that thought.

"I have tried setting a timer," Maranya sheepishly admitted. "But, for whatever reason, my mind somehow blocks out the sound, and the next thing I know, I'm getting a whiff of charcoaled chocolate. I don't have that problem with my focus in any other area, just cooking." Her lips pursed in deep contemplation of that revelation on her part. "I may need to get a timer with a voice instead of a buzzer, and see if that solves the problem."

Then she shook her head with a smile, and started the process of putting the red tagged pile of printouts in front of her into alphabetical order while she answered Xenia's question about the switchboard, "You saw Phyllia out front, at Reception, answering all those calls, da? Take her job, and multiply it by a factor of fifty. That is the switchboard. Trust me, as tedious as this is, I'd still rather shuffle papers than field thousands of calls a day."

"Mm, there was a research study once, which proved that people tend to respond better and faster to a voice, in particular a feminine voice, than any other form of alert system out there." Maranya tapped her lips with the sheaf of paper in her hand in thought for a moment. "I suppose it is pravilno, as I know I do tend to jump to attention when I'm paged over the intercom, and that's usually a woman doing it."

Setting those papers aside, she picked up her mug of WonderCoffee, and sipped at its contents. Her nose wrinkled when the cold brew hit her tongue, but she continued to sip until the mug was drained. The mug was returned to its place off to the side on her desk.

Laughter colored her voice at Xenia's comment about the switchboards. "I played receptionist for my Papa once, at his office, when I was thirteen." She picked up the sheaf of paper that she had set aside earlier, and tapped them against her lips again with a wistful expression this time. Then she nodded, and continued that train of thought, "That experience forever dashed any desire that I might have had to pursue a career in any way related to the telephone industry."

Maranya laughed softly. "Likely so! Pavlov's dogs and their bells have nothing on the way I am conditioned to respond when I hear those voices over the PA system."

She swiveled in her chair to refill her mug with WonderCoffee, and set it aside, safely away from the paperwork towers on the main portion of her desk. "Phyllia has the patience of a saint' nyet, two saints, at least, to do the job as well and as cheerfully as she does."

Noting that expression of distaste on Xenia's face, she laughed again. "Let me guess, Alper had you fielding calls all day, every day, when you worked for him."

It was quite an amazing, if rare, sight to see. First, Maranya's right eyebrow ticked upward in the classical gesture of surprise as normal. Then, individually, her left brow followed suit. A seemingly simple gesture for some, but it had taken her two years of training before her bedroom mirror to learn it. And a full year to retrain herself to do it again, after the fire.

"Both of their jobs! Bozhe moi, I can see why you jumped at the chance to work for me then," she declared with a shake of her head. "This is like a vacation for you, after all."

Her hazels narrowed slightly behind her glasses lenses to study the neat stacks of color tagged printouts on her desk. Then she nodded in approval. "This is all we have to deal with?." She let those words hang in the air a moment before she continued, "For today. I'll be inputting the information into the database. Thankfully, that task is easy in comparison."

Maranya smiled at Xenia. "Your next task, should you decide to accept it, is to set up a perpetually updating computer program to record my appointments, both personal and work oriented. Phyllia should have most of the information you'll need, and I can fill in the blanks that she doesn't know about." Her lips pursed in consideration a moment. "I highly suggest you take a lunch break, and then get some chai before you begin."

Maranya's laughter harmonized with Xenia's. "Excellent! I will definitely depend on you to keep my schedule straight then. Beyond knows, I need the help with that."

She looked over the neat stacks of printouts again, and nodded. "Da, we are most definitely done with sorting for now," she answered. Then she gestured in a shooing manner. "Go, go, and get some lunch and chai. And, if you could please bring me back a hot turkey sandwich from the cafeteria on your way back, I'd definitely appreciate it."

Maranya's delighted laughter echoed in the office once Xenia left.

By the Beyond, I should have hired her sooner. She is a treasure!

She turned to begin the input of the patient records into her private system. This process was much less labor intensive than the initial sorting had been, as she fed the sheets into a bar scanner one by one. Once the information from each document came up on her flatscreen monitor, she input the color tag designation into the proper field, and waited for the program to process the data.

Spasibo, dearest Lyev moya, for suggesting that Xenia come to work for me.

A warm smile curved her lips as she fed the next file into the scanning device.