Tuesday
Room B had forty folding chairs. Eleven were used. The air conditioning had been set for August in April, and the room smelled of carpet glue and somebody's coffee. 7716 was locked in the truck in the garage on Jefferson, on the signal tap's spare circuit, because she had not wanted to leave it in the sun and had not wanted to bring a gravimeter into a hearing as if it were a witness. The Board sat at a long table under the state seal, five members, one of them on a screen from Flagstaff whose sound arrived half a second after his mouth moved. Desert Mutual's counsel sat in the front row with two binders tabbed in yellow. Haas sat two rows behind her and looked at the carpet.
The clerk called 49-007, supplemental item 7, Pacheco, notary 118. Five minutes. Someone had put a kitchen timer on the table, the kind with a white dial that you twist.
She didn't read the item. They had it.
"Exhibit 7, page 31. It's the Board's exhibit, from the Department's file. The curve plots the band on a lot against the number of measured controls within sixty metres of it. From zero controls to one it falls most of the way. After one it's almost flat." She held the page up toward the camera so Flagstaff could see it. "Five hundred eighty-eight tiles in Maricopa have only legacy certificates. The index gives them the wide band. The people living under them are paying for an inverse nobody re-ran. A tile is two hundred metres a side, so one re-occupation, at the lot nearest the centre, with depth to water measured from the sensor datum, narrows the band fully only for the lots within sixty metres. It narrows the rest because it ends the depth default for the whole tile. The Department's actuary can say how far. At cost it's about six hundred forty dollars a tile. That's a floor, not a price."
She didn't give the payback figure. That was Haas's number, and she had told him she wouldn't use it.
"Item 7 asks the Board to find one thing: that a legacy series re-occupied with measured depth is a valid control. Who pays isn't this Board's question. I've written to the Department about that."
The timer still had a minute and ten seconds on it. She sat down. Somebody behind her shifted on a chair.
Calloway, Desert Mutual's counsel, didn't argue with the curve. She argued with a word.
"The notary asks the Board to call a re-occupied series a valid control. If the re-occupation is valid, then the original wasn't. I'd ask Ms. Pacheco, under her license: were her own certificates from 2045 to 2047 deficient?"
Chair Ybarra looked at Lourdes over his glasses and didn't tell her she had to answer. She stood anyway.
There were three answers in the room. No was the one Calloway wanted, because then the Board was being asked to pay for nothing. Yes would reach, by Friday, the forty-one owners whose series she had signed, and some of them had refinanced on that paper. She took the third one, and she said it slowly, because it was going into a transcript.
"They were true for what they measured. They measured mass change between two dates on one lot. They didn't measure depth to water, because in 2045 nobody asked for it and the rule didn't require it. The index now uses them to answer a question they weren't built for. That isn't a deficiency in the certificate. It's a deficiency in how they're being reused."
"So it's the index that's deficient," Calloway said.
"Where the index has no measured depth, it uses a sixty-metre default. Your actuary's exhibit shows what that costs." She didn't say his name. She didn't look at him.
Then she added the thing she had decided in the truck that morning, which nobody had asked her for.
"I'll file an amendment notice on all forty-one of my legacy series. It states what each one measured and what it didn't. Not a withdrawal. A scope line. At my cost."
Ybarra wrote something down. Calloway closed one binder. The member in Flagstaff said "Sorry, could you repeat," and Ybarra said "Under advisement, thirty days," and the clerk called 49-008.
In the hallway, beside a drinking fountain that hadn't worked since 2041, she held out a ten and a five.
Haas looked at the money.
"Eggs," she said.
He took it. The back of his neck went red. A paralegal from his own side watched it happen from the elevator bank, and Lourdes thought that was fine. A gift returned in front of a witness was the only kind that stayed returned.
4/27 49-007 ITEM 7 HEARD. P.31 ONLY. CALLOWAY: 'DEFICIENT?' ANSWERED: TRUE FOR WHAT THEY MEASURED; THE REUSE IS DEFICIENT. SCOPE-LINE AMENDMENT ON ALL 41, MY COST. HAAS REPAID $15, WITNESSED. 30 DAYS.
Thursday
The letter to the Department took longer than the item had. The item was four sentences. The letter had to be a complaint without reading like a press release, and it had to survive being forwarded.
Kitchen table, overhead light, her mother's oilcloth with the lemons. Page 31 open. Beside it, the tile list printed from her own spreadsheet: 588 rows, with tile ID, legacy count, band before, and band at one control.
The first draft named streets: Campbell Avenue, 51st, the Lucero block. It read well, and that was what bothered her about it.
A tile was two hundred metres on a side. In Maryvale that came to sixty or seventy houses. Put a street name on a complaint about an insurance load and the next thing anyone posted would be a map labelled these houses have bad ground. That wasn't true. The band was wide because nobody had gone back and measured. The ground under those houses wasn't moving any more than anywhere else. A street name would turn a gap in the record into a fact about the dirt. The Lucero nephew had already been out with a hose before anyone came to measure. Someone holding a list of streets would do something worse.
So the letter gave tile numbers only. The Department could join them to its own book. Anyone else would need the index to read them, and the index was Desert Mutual's.
It made three requests. First, that a per-tile uncertainty load be treated as a rating factor and disclosed as its own line on the renewal, so the homeowner could see it. Second, where an insurer could remove the load for less than it collected, that the insurer be asked why it hadn't. Third, that any re-occupation an insurer paid for carry a payer line on the certificate, and that the notary doing it not be the one who signed the original series.
She signed with her license number and nothing else. No respectfully. Ofelia had told her once that the Department's readers skipped to the requests and then read the signature to see who to call.
She read the letter for adjectives. There were none left. She found one adverb, clearly, and cut it, because if it was clear it didn't need the word.
At eleven she ran the arithmetic one more time on the back of an envelope, because the Department would. 588 tiles at $640 came to about $376,000, once. Haas's ten to twelve percent, on even a few thousand policies on those tiles, would pass that inside one renewal and keep going every year after. Three thousand policies at two thousand dollars was six or seven hundred thousand a year. The money to fix it was smaller than one year of the charge. She didn't put Haas's percentage in the letter. She put the Department's own exhibit page and let them multiply.
Certified mail, $9.85, Friday morning, the post office on 35th Avenue. The clerk asked if it was important. She said it was a letter.
4/29 DIFI LETTER. 588 TILE IDS, NO STREETS. A STREET ON A LOAD COMPLAINT BECOMES 'BAD GROUND.' ASKS: LOAD AS A LINE ON RENEWAL; WHY NOT REMOVED IF CHEAPER; PAYER LINE, DIFFERENT NOTARY. $9.85.
Saturday
On the twentieth Marisol had asked whether her rent would change. Lourdes had told her she'd come back when she knew something. She didn't know much yet, but she'd said Saturday, so she went.
The front room smelled of someone's cumin breakfast. A box fan was already running in the window, and it was the first of May. Marisol's boy lay on the floor with a tablet and headphones and didn't look up.
The lease ran forty-one pages, Saguaro Residential Holdings II, standard form. Marisol had marked page 9 with a hair clip.
Insurance recovery: Tenant's monthly charge includes a pro-rata share of property insurance premium, adjusted annually at Landlord's renewal. On the ledger: $38 a month.
"If the insurance goes down, does this go down?"
Lourdes read it twice, her thumb on adjusted annually.
"It says adjusted. It doesn't say which way. When the premium goes up at renewal, this goes up. It ought to come down when the premium comes down, but nothing in here makes anyone show you the premium." She stopped. "I'm a gravity notary. I can tell you what's under your floor. I can't tell you what this sentence means in court."
"Who can?"
On the back of her card she wrote the Community Legal Services number. Under it she wrote the tile ID for this house, and under that, re-occupied 4/2049, depth measured, #118.
"If they ask what changed, this is what changed. Not the ground. The record."
"So the house is better now?"
"The house is the same. The paper on it is better. Whether better paper gets to your rent is Saguaro's choice."
She knew how it would go and didn't say it. A load went into rent on the day the premium rose. Relief would come out of rent only if someone in an office in Scottsdale bothered to run the pro-rata again, and nothing in forty-one pages made them. Rents went up when premiums did. They came down only if someone made them.
As she left, the boy pulled one headphone away from his ear and asked whether the machine in her truck was a bomb detector.
"It weighs things."
"Like the whole house?"
"The whole street. A little."
He put the headphone back.
5/1 MARISOL LEASE P.9: INSURANCE RECOVERY $38/MO, 'ADJUSTED ANNUALLY,' NO PREMIUM SHOWN. GAVE CLS + TILE ID + RE-OCC NOTE. THE LOAD REACHES RENT RIGHT AWAY. RELIEF ONLY IF THE LANDLORD SENDS IT BACK.
Monday
Ofelia had the stamp inked before Lourdes got to the counter. Forty-one amendment notices at $60 each, scope lines typed, one per series: Measured: mass change, dates as shown, this lot. Not measured: depth to water. Not intended for: off-lot calibration. The receipt said $2,460. Lourdes paid with her own card and asked for a paper copy.
Ofelia read the first scope line upside down. "Does this touch anybody's loan?"
"Only if their lender was using it off-lot," Lourdes said. "And then the lender was wrong first."
Ofelia didn't say anything. She stamped the first one.
Raúl Lucero was waiting on the bench by the door. He was the nephew, in his Glendale Community College hoodie, with a printout of the Board's agenda and item 7 circled in blue pen.
"If they pass it," he said, "can you do my aunt's? You didn't sign hers. So you're allowed. It says a different notary."
He had read it closely, and he was right. Under item 7 she was exactly the kind of notary who could do it. Mrs. Lucero's lot sat on one of the 588 tiles. Desert Mutual would pay her six hundred forty dollars, maybe more, and she would earn every dollar of it.
She had also written the rule that made her eligible, and put the curve into the record that made the work exist. If item 7 passed, every one of those tiles became a job, and the notary who had argued for it in Room B would be the first name anybody in Maryvale found.
"Not this year," she said.
"Why? You're the one who knows how."
"Because I asked the Board for it. If I take the work, the next person in Room B says I wrote myself a contract. Then it doesn't pass."
She took his agenda and wrote three names on the back. Fermín Robles, #188, first, and under him two others she trusted who had never signed anything on Campbell Avenue.
"Any of these. If it passes."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then nobody does it, and your aunt's tile stays orange." She handed it back. "And don't water the yard the day they come."
He laughed. Then he saw she meant it and folded the agenda into his pocket.
She stood at the counter after he went back to the bench and read her own request 3 in her head. A notary who hadn't signed the original series. She hadn't signed Mrs. Lucero's. The rule let her in. What kept her out was that she had argued the item, and nothing in the item said so. She had written a rule with a hole in it and was about to cover the hole with her own signature, which would last exactly as long as she did.
She asked Ofelia for a blank filer's undertaking and wrote one line in block capitals:
#118 WILL NOT ACCEPT INSURER-FUNDED RE-OCCUPATION UNDER 49-007 ITEM 7 BEFORE 5/2050.
Ofelia stamped it without comment. Then she said, "That's a year of money."
"About thirty thousand dollars," Lourdes said. "If it passes."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then it cost me nothing, and the curve is still on page 31."
5/3 41 SCOPE LINES FILED, $2,460. R. LUCERO ASKED FOR AN ITEM-7 JOB. NO. I ARGUED IT, I DON'T TAKE IT. UNDERTAKING TO 5/2050 COVERS A HOLE IN MY OWN REQUEST 3 (NOTHING BARS A NOTARY WHO APPEARED FOR THE ITEM). REFERRED #188 + 2. ~$30K FOREGONE IF IT PASSES. BOARD DUE 5/27.