The Fax Vote

The tow lot called me at six forty on a Wednesday and told me my car sat in a gravel lot at the edge of Kolora Street, and if I wanted the keys I could collect them from the locksmith. Not the impound. The locksmith. I figured that was a small town thing and drove over in an Uber, which cost me more than the parking fine would have.

The van sat at the back of the lot, a converted motor home with LOCKSMITH HOLLY stenciled on the side in yellow letters. A ramp door stood open at the rear. Inside I could see a workbench, a rolling chair, and a fax machine that was grinding out a page with all the enthusiasm of a man being fed to a wood chipper.

I knocked on the door frame. "Hello? Here about a tow?"

A woman came around from the front cab. Mid thirties, work shirt with the sleeves rolled, a wrench in one hand like she'd been using it as a pointer. "You the professor?"

"Brendan Wertz. Urban planning, university. My car?"

"Samuelson. Holly. Yeah, it's the grey one up front. Towed it this morning, block on Weller, call came in at six forty." She wiped her hands on a rag. "Keys are in the van. Come in, mind the floor, it's mostly floor."

I climbed up the ramp steps into the van and understood immediately why people say small spaces smell like work. Lubricant, vinyl, a little solder. The fax machine was still feeding. A printed page hung off it, and taped to its lid was a photocopy of an agenda, and I knew that agenda the way you know your own handwriting.

"Is that the neighborhood association agenda for Thursday?" I said.

She looked at the fax machine like it had betrayed her. "Yeah. Somebody keeps faxing me the other side's talking points, the preservation side. I never figured out who. I keep them, though. Good to know what you're up against."

"Up against."

She tilted her head. "You're the preservation guy. Brendan Wertz. I read your letter in the newsletter. The one with the words 'irreversible character damage' in the first paragraph."

Oh. Oh no. I had matched with this woman on an app four days ago. Her profile said she liked "big vehicles and small arguments." We'd traded maybe twenty messages. She was funny. She had suggested coffee. And here I was in her van, and her name was on the side of it, and I had just spent forty minutes writing my rebuttal to her side of the biggest vote this neighborhood had seen in a decade.

"You're Holly Samuelson," I said. "The development side."

"The jobs and property values side, yeah." She didn't sound angry. She sounded like someone recalculating. "You're the guy with the app profile that says he reads zoning codes for fun. Which, by the way, I thought was a joke. It is not a joke, is it."

"It is not a joke."

The fax machine finished a page with a satisfied little beep, like it had scored a point for somebody.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Well. You want your keys, here are your keys." She held them out. I took them. Our fingers didn't do anything dramatic, but I noticed her hand anyway, which felt like a problem. "Car's out front. Sorry about the tow. If your car hadn't been blocking the delivery lane I'd have left it."

"That's fair."

"You can go."

"I could," I said. "Or I could ask why you've got a printout of the development consortium's traffic study pinned under that magnet."

"Because I wrote half of it and I like to keep the good parts where I can see them."

Now it was my turn to recalculate. "You wrote the traffic study? That's not a tow driver's usual hobby."

"I'm a tow driver and a part-time locksmith, and three years ago I dated a contractor who taught me to read plans, and after we split up I kept reading them. Then the consortium hired me on a contract to do vehicle turnover counts for the site." She folded her arms. "I'm also the one who's gonna stand up Thursday and tell forty people that a grocery store and four hundred jobs beat a heritage fence. So."

"An eight meter retail wall beats a heritage fence," I said. "That's the whole argument? Jobs?"

"Jobs and the fact that half the shops on Weller are empty."

"Because rents doubled."

"Because there's no foot traffic, and there's no foot traffic because there's nothing to walk to. You preserve the character, you preserve the emptiness. Character doesn't pay rent, Professor."

"It does when the character is the thing people move here for."

Outside, a neighbor's dog started up, and behind it came a voice I recognized as Mrs. Daniels from the corner house, the kind of voice that travels. Holly glanced at the open door and said, "One second," and shut the ramp door, cutting the afternoon in half.

The van got smaller. It happens fast in a space like that. Her workbench, her rolling chair, the fax machine, me, and maybe a meter of air between us that had suddenly become very interesting.

"Sorry," she said. "Mrs. Daniels reports everything I do to the association. Last month she reported that I parked crooked. I'd turned the van around to reach a gate." She waved at the bench. "Sit if you want. Or stand. Stand, we're not going to agree, no point getting comfortable."

I stayed standing. So did she. We leaned on opposite ends of the bench like two sides of a courtroom, which was funny, because spread across the middle of the bench was a zoning map, and it was the same map, my map, from my own folder.

"That's mine," I said.

"This is mine. Printed Tuesday. Great minds." She put a finger on the commercial parcel. "Here. Four hundred jobs."

I put my finger next to hers, on the same parcel. "Here. The last intact commercial streetscape from the fifties in this district. You knock that down, you can't get it back. Not ever. There's no version of this where they build it again."

"There's no version of this where the grocery store pays for itself either, but the consortium's accountant hasn't worked that out yet, so don't tell him."

"The traffic alone," I said. "Four hundred jobs means what, three hundred cars?"

"Sixty percent of which walk in from the new apartments, if the apartments get approved, which they won't if your faction keeps filing objections."

"We filed two objections."

"You filed two objections and your friend Dante filed eleven. Eleven, Brendan. The man has a form letter."

I laughed before I could stop myself. Dante did have a form letter. "Eleven is excessive."

"Eleven is a hobby." She was smiling now, and I was smiling, and somewhere in the back of my head a voice said, careful, this is the enemy, and the rest of me said, the enemy has good handwriting and smells like engine grease.

The fax machine started up again. We both looked at it.

"Who keeps faxing you?" I asked.

"I told you, I never worked it out. It started three weeks ago. Every page is pro-preservation. Charts. Laminated arguments, basically." She pulled the fresh page off the tray and read it. "'Pedestrian amenity on Weller would be permanently degraded.' Oh sure, permanently. Says who?"

"Says me," I said. "That's from our side's submission. That's my sentence. I wrote 'permanently degraded' at eleven at night on Sunday."

She looked at the page. Looked at me. "You're faxing me your own talking points?"

"Absolutely not. I don't even have your number, let alone your fax line."

"Then who gave someone my fax number?" She stopped. "Wait. Who has your submission at all? It's not public yet."

"I came here for my keys, Holly."

"Then someone is faxing my van your side's arguments, word for word. Someone is running this fight through fax machines like it's 1994." She put the page down. "That's either a very bored person or a very smart one."

"A very smart one," I said, "would just email."

"Email leaves a trail. Fax machines are anonymous. It's like vandalism for nerds."

I was still holding my keys. I put them in my pocket, which should have been the end of the visit. It was not the end of the visit. Instead I leaned over the map, and she leaned over the map, and my elbow caught the display stand of lock picks she had arranged in a neat little row at the edge of the bench.

They went over in a bright clatter. Picks, tension wrenches, a small vice handle, all of it toward the floor.

"Sorry, sorry," I said, and we both bent for them at the same time.

We stopped. That's the honest version. We both reached for the same tension wrench, and then we were down there on the van floor, crouched, inches apart, her face level with mine, the picks forgotten between our hands. The van was quiet except for the fax machine warming up for another page. There was a smear of grease on her jaw and a lock pick nearly touching my shoe and I could not remember what side of the vote I was on, which was not true, I could remember exactly, I just didn't care for a second.

"Well," she said. "This is awkward."

"Kinda," I said.

"We're on opposite sides of a vote that happens tomorrow night."

"I know."

"And you're on my floor."

"I know that too."

She picked up the tension wrench, slow, her eyes still on me. "Neither of us is gonna change our vote. Right?"

"Right," I said. And then, because it was true and because the van was very small: "Probably."

The fax machine started printing again. Page three of whatever the preservation blast was, and I did the dumb thing, which was reach past her and grab the page straight out of the tray.

"Hey," Holly said. "That's my fax."

"It's my sentence. You don't get to argue against my own sentence in front of me."

"That's not how arguments work, Brendan." She reached for it. I held it up and out of the way, which was petty, and she went up on her toes after it, and then her hand closed around my wrist instead of the paper. Firm grip. Locksmith grip. She did not let go.

We were close enough that I could see the grease smear on her jaw had a fingerprint in it. The page drooped in my other hand. The machine fed another one behind it, whirring, indifferent.

"You gonna hand that over?" she asked.

"Kinda depends."

"On what?"

"On whether you're gonna concede permanent."

"I'm gonna rip it to strips is what I'm gonna do." But she wasn't pulling. Her hand was still around my wrist, thumb resting on the pulse point, and we were both just standing there holding a piece of paper between us like it was a wishbone. "You know this is ridiculous. Right? Tell me you know."

"I know," I said. "Forty-four years old, fighting over a fax in a van."

"Thirty-six, and same." Her thumb moved maybe a centimeter. "So what's the play here, professor. We gonna keep pretending this is about the parcel?"

I looked at her and she looked back, clear-eyed, sober, waiting, not moving an inch closer. The key point was that she made it easy. All I had to do was say a word.

"Can I kiss you?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "Thought you'd never ask."

It was a testing kiss at first, the kind where two people are checking whether the other one means it. She did. I did. Her mouth tasted of the coffee she'd been drinking out of a dented thermos, and her grip on my wrist slid up to my forearm, and the kiss stopped being a test around the ten second mark. The fax machine spat out page four behind us. I heard it hit the tray and neither of us turned around.

"Okay," she said against my mouth. "Okay, wow!" She walked me back a step, then another, and the back of my knees hit the padded workbench. She gave me a shove, not hard, just enough, and I sat down on it, and the zoning map crinkled under my ass. "Don't crease my map."

"You put a map on a workbench, that's on you."

"It's laminated." She climbed one knee up beside my hip. "It survives everything. Learned that from a contractor, actually."

"Three years ago. You mentioned."

"You were listening. Good." She kissed me again, deeper, her hand flat on my chest, and I got my fingers into the collar of her coveralls and found the zipper. I paused with it half an inch down and