Ballot Boxed In

The Grange Post Office smelled like old paper and wood smoke, the way it always did, and Jessi Greer pushed the door open with her hip because both her hands were full of a cookie tray. Twenty-three years old, two years out of college, and she was about to beg a room full of retirees to let her build houses on the old Duffy farm lot.

She saw him before she saw anything else.

Ahmed Lund was standing behind a folding table at the front of the room, a ballot box in front of him and a stack of papers squared off beside it. Thirty-one now, broader in the shoulders than he'd been at the marketing seminar where they'd met, and the second she recognized him her knees did something unprofessional.

The tray tilted. She caught it with a grunt and a cookie slid off the edge anyway, and she had to pin it against her chest with her elbow.

"Careful there," said Dot Friesen, coming past her with a thermos. "Those for the meeting or just for you?"

"Meeting. Bribery, actually." Jessi laughed, too loud. "I mean, not bribery. Cookies. Neighborly cookies."

"Well, they'll work on Al. He's got no principles and a sweet tooth." Dot nodded toward the table. "You know Ahmed, don't you? He's secretary now. Runs the whole thing like a drill sergeant."

"We've met," Jessi said, and her voice came out strange, so she coughed and said it again, normal. "We've met."

She got the tray onto the back counter next to the ham radio, which was hissing away at a weather station out of the Maritimes somewhere, a woman's voice droning about a low pressure system. Then she squared her blazer and walked up to the table like someone who had not once in her life dropped a cookie in front of her ex-boyfriend.

"Evening," Ahmed said. He was looking at the sign-in sheet, and then he wasn't, and then they were just looking at each other in the middle of rural Nova Scotia like a couple of idiots.

"Hi," Jessi said. "You're the ballot guy."

"Somebody's got to count the votes." He smiled, and it was the same smile, crooked on one side, and she felt it in her sternum. "Hi, Jessi."

"Hi. You look good. You look, uh. Good."

"Thanks. You too. Cookies?"

"What?"

"Did you bring cookies?"

"Oh. Yes. There's a tray. Back counter!" She gestured behind her and nearly knocked a coffee urn with her elbow. "Anyway. I should probably. The pitch. People are sitting down."

"They are sitting down," Ahmed agreed, and rang the little brass bell Dot had given the association back in the nineties. "Alright, everybody, settle in. Grange Road Neighborhood Association, October meeting, called to order. Ballots at the end, so don't wander off."

The ham radio crackled and the weather lady said something about wind. Jessi stood up front with her pointer stick and her rendering boards and got about four sentences into her pitch before Ahmed looked up from his paperwork and smiled at her again, just briefly, and she lost the entire thread of the English language.

"So the, um. The lots. There are fourteen lots. Or twelve. Sorry, fourteen lots, twelve of them are, hold on." She flipped a page on her board and the page wasn't there. "Twelve buildable lots plus a shared green space, which I think is really, the green space is really, it's a selling point, is what I'm getting at."

Al raised his hand from the third row. "What's the road situation?"

"Gravel, then paved. Two access points off Grange Road, so nobody's got a single bottleneck."

"And septic?"

"Engineered fields, every lot. I've got the perc test results right here, they were, the tests were excellent."

The ham radio squawked again, louder this time, and half the room flinched. Somebody's voice came through about a front moving up the coast. Ahmed reached over without looking and turned the volume down with two fingers, easy, like he'd done it a hundred times, and Jessi watched him do it and forgot what a perc test was for a full second.

She got through the rest of it. Mostly. She said "the green space" eleven times, which Dot counted out loud at the end, and then it was question period and a woman named Barb stuck her hand straight up.

"I don't care about the lots," Barb said. "I care about skunks. My porch has skunks under it. Has for three weeks. What is this association going to do about skunks?"

"Well," Jessi started, "I can't speak to skunks, but..."

"Ahmed's got traps," Dot said. "He does it professionally. Pest control, out of Weymouth."

"Skunks dig under porches, Barb, not developments," said Al, and then the room was off, five people talking at once about skunks, and Ahmed held up a hand.

"I've got two traps set behind the hall and one at Barb's place as of Saturday. Let me go check the back room while you finish questions. If I've got one in the cage I'd rather deal with it tonight."

He stepped through the door at the back of the post office, past a shelf of dead letter parcels, and the door swung half shut behind him. Jessi looked at the room. The room looked at Jessi. Barb said, "Well, go on then, girl, we can look at your drawings ourselves."

So she went.

The back room was narrow and cluttered, shelving on one side and a big old wooden counter on the other, and a single bulb hanging from a cord. Ahmed was crouched by a cage trap near the far wall, and there was in fact something moving in it, a shape with a stripe, and he had a moving blanket draped over the cage to keep it calm.

"Careful," he said without turning around. "He's in a mood."

"You caught one."

"Caught one Saturday, actually. He's been living in the trap eating cat food like a king. I've been waiting for a night warm enough to relocate him." He glanced back at her. "You didn't have to follow me back here."

"I know." She leaned against the shelving unit, and that was a mistake, because the shelf held a leaning tower of old calendars, association calendars going back years, and her shoulder caught the stack and the whole thing went over. Calendars everywhere, sliding across the concrete, and she yelped and grabbed at nothing.

Ahmed was up fast. He caught her wrist, not to yank her, just to steady her, and then he didn't let go, and the calendars could slide around on the floor all they wanted because neither of them was looking at them.

"Sorry," Jessi said. "I break things around you. That's apparently a theme."

"You knocked over a coffee at the seminar, too. First day."

"It went on the instructor's laptop. I remember."

"Three months," Ahmed said. "We dated three months and then I took the Weymouth job and I told myself I'd call when I was settled, and then I was settled, and then it had been eight months and it felt too stupid to call after eight months. So I didn't. And that was the coward's version of things."

"Two years," Jessi said. Her wrist was still in his hand and she made no move about it. "It's been two years. I looked you up in the spring. I couldn't find you anywhere."

"I got a new phone. Same number, actually, I just never updated anything." He laughed, short and embarrassed. "I'm bad at this part. The talking part."

"You're good at skunks."

"Skunks are honest. They want cat food and a dark corner. Very straightforward." He looked down at the cage, then back up at her, and the little bulb swung once on its cord. "I missed you, Jessi. I should have said it two years ago. I missed you the whole time."

The blanket over the cage shifted and there was a low grumble from inside it, and they both laughed, and that broke whatever had frozen up in her chest, mostly.

"Well," she said. "There's about forty minutes left of my presentation and a vote at the end. And I still have cookies nobody's eaten."

"Dot will handle the cookies. Dot handles everything." His thumb moved once across the inside of her wrist, just once. "After the vote. There's a back corner of this room and two chairs that came with the building, probably in 1950, and I'd like to sit in one of them and talk to you like someone who isn't running a ballot box."

"Yeah," Jessi said. "Okay. After the vote."

"After the vote," he said, and let go of her wrist, and went to pick up the calendars.

The rest of the meeting went the way Jessi expected, which was badly, then suddenly not badly at all. She got through her last forty minutes with only two interruptions, one from the ham radio hissing out a marine forecast and one from Barb asking if the new houses would attract skunks. Jessi said probably not, and Barb said well, that remained to be seen, and Al said he'd seen worse ideas than houses, which from Al was practically a standing ovation.

Then Ahmed brought out the ballot box.

It was an actual wooden box with a slot cut in the lid, and Jessi stood next to it while the association filed past, one by one, folding their little papers and dropping them in. She counted heads. Eleven. She needed six.

Ahmed leaned close as Dot dropped her paper in, close enough that she felt his breath at her ear.

"I still think about that first date," he whispered. "The diner with the broken jukebox. I think about it more than I should."

Jessi felt it go all the way down her spine, a slow warm shiver, and she had to look at the ballot box and not at him. "You're the secretary," she whispered back. "You're supposed to be neutral."

"I'm neutral about the vote. Not about you."

"Ahmed." She said it low, half a warning and half nothing at all, and he smiled and turned to the room like a man with a clean conscience.

He counted the papers out on the counter where the radio sat hissing, with Dot reading each one over his shoulder so nobody could say the secretary had fiddled it. He was quick about it, sliding each one into a pile, and the room went quiet except for the weather out of