Friday
The fish fry at St. Vincent de Paul ran until eight-thirty. By ten past nine Lourdes had the smell of the fryer in her hair and three folders on the kitchen table, in the order she'd filed them years ago. Soto, 43rd Avenue, October 2046. Duarte, Campbell, March 2047. Iniguez, 59th Drive, January 2048. Abuela was asleep. The swamp cooler ticked.
All three said UNTIED in the Basis line. In those years nobody tied a lot survey to anything. You set the head on the nail, ran the night, and subtracted your own dry median. The valley's slow loss mostly came out in the wash, because it was in the median too.
Under item 6, as she'd sent it to Aguirre on Tuesday, those three now carried UNDETERMINED. She'd meant to tie them over the weekend and fill the field.
She opened rev. 3 to the tie clause and read it the way Mateo would read it at a hearing.
Tie within seven days of the occupation, same head, to a pier on alluvium within 3 km, or to Papago with the distance stated and the regional term corrected.
Seven days from the occupation, not from the certificate. A tie put the pier and the head under the same week's tide and the same week's creep in the head's own spring. You couldn't tie October 2046 in April 2049. The pier had dropped by whatever the valley had pumped since. She'd be subtracting a number from another year and calling it a correction.
She checked Papago's published series for the Soto night anyway. Two heads had been on the pier that October. Neither was hers, and neither had a published offset to hers.
So three of her own certificates would say UNDETERMINED for good. Nothing in them was wrong. The rule that made them honest also made them silent. Anyone who wanted Soto supported would have to pay for a new night.
She wrote the card in pencil.
4/2 SOTO, DUARTE, INIGUEZ: TIE WINDOW 7 D. CAN'T TIE 2046–48 NOW. UNDETERMINED FOR GOOD UNLESS RE-OCCUPIED. MY RULE DID THIS. GOOD.
The last word looked smug. She struck it and left it legible.
Saturday
Fermín had pulled in beside her at Food City because he'd seen her car. They were at his tailgate comparing pier logs, his in a plastic sleeve, hers on the back of a receipt, when her phone rang. R. VEGA. She put it on speaker. She wanted a witness, and Fermín was a notary.
"You said anybody licensed could measure it. Who?"
"Not me. My series is already on your tile." She looked at Fermín. "He isn't."
Fermín leaned toward the phone. "Señora, Fermín Robles, licence 188. A walking survey's two nights. One dry baseline, one after you'd normally water. Pier tie the same week. Fourteen hundred, and Records charges sixty to file."
The pause went long enough that Lourdes checked the screen.
"My renewal went up three hundred and ten," Vega said. "A year. You want fourteen hundred to tell me whether it should have."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And if it says I'm dry?"
"Then you've got a certificate that says dry, with a radius on it. You send it to Desert Mutual and the model has to use it."
"Has to?"
Fermín looked at Lourdes. She shook her head. Has to was Haas's to say, and Haas hadn't said it.
"They should," Lourdes said. "That's the most I know."
"So I pay fourteen hundred and sixty dollars to argue with a computer that used your number." Vega didn't sound angry. She sounded like she was adding it up on the back of an envelope. "Thank you. I'll think."
Fermín slid his log back into its sleeve. "I'd do it at cost. Head rental and the filing. Six-forty."
"Then do it."
"You know what happens. Every HIGH tile in the valley calls me Monday for six-forty."
She knew. A fortnight ago it had been her name on forty-one roofs. Now the remedy was going to be a notary's discount, one house at a time, for whoever happened to have the right phone number.
4/3 VEGA: +$310/YR. SURVEY $1400 + $60. 188 AT COST $640. 'I'LL THINK.' THE FIX IS A FAVOUR. FAVOURS DON'T SCALE.
Monday
She ran the Papago tie at dawn, because the Soto night would need one inside the week, whether or not Soto said yes. The 0402, serial ending 7716, on the pier's brass. It came in at −1.9 µGal against the published line. She stated the distance the way rev. 3 said to: 18.9 km from the pier to the Soto lot on 43rd Avenue, measured on the county map, not guessed from the freeway signs. The regional term scaled with it, and at nineteen kilometres it was most of the correction. There was no alluvial pier inside 3 km of Maryvale. She'd known that when she wrote the clause. She drove to West Jefferson with the case belted into the passenger seat.
The 49-007 docket opened at eight. Desert Mutual had filed at 07:59. She read the printout on the bench by the window with the ticket machine calling numbers to nobody.
There were four comments. The Arizona Home Inspectors Association asked whether a stated radius obliged a notary to tell the neighbours inside it. In the margin she wrote no, but read it twice. #204 and #231 supported item 6 in a line each. #231 had added, Please make it fast. I have a daycare.
Desert Mutual's comment ran four pages, signed by legal, not by Haas. It supported item 6 as a significant contribution to parcel-level accuracy. It agreed the radius should follow the deepest water named and be measured below the sensor. They'd read the revision closely enough to adopt every part that cost them nothing.
Page three:
Where support is UNDETERMINED, Desert Mutual respectfully proposes a default radius of 20 m, for continuity with existing certificate practice and to avoid an abrupt loss of usable data across approximately 4,100 legacy certificates.
Twenty metres. It was the number she'd crossed out on the graph paper the Sunday before last, with Abuela shelling pecans across the table. She'd shown that draft to no one. They'd arrived at it on their own. That meant it was the obvious number, and the obvious number was the dangerous one.
She did the sum the bench allowed. If a tenth of four thousand certificates sat over perched water on caliche, or a slab leak under a deep footing, four hundred of them would be read out to twenty metres on lots where the true radius ran sixty or eighty. On paper it would be a radius. On the ground it would be a guess. And nobody would see it, because twenty metres looked modest, and nobody asks a modest number to explain itself.
Ofelia brought two coffees in paper cups.
"They agreed with almost everything," Ofelia said.
"They agreed with everything that doesn't touch a legacy file."
4/5 PAPAGO TIE, 7716, −1.9, 18.9 KM. DM WANTS 20 M DEFAULT FOR UNDETERMINED, ~4100 LEGACY. MY CROSSED-OUT NUMBER. REPLY DUE 4/12.
Tuesday
Twenty to eleven. Two things on the table: the docket printout and her chequebook.
She did the chequebook first, because it was the smaller problem. She could afford six hundred and forty dollars. She could mail it to Fermín with Vega's address and never tell Vega. It would be a kindness. It would also be #118 paying for a certificate on a parcel #118's series already sat on, in the same week she'd told forty-one households she had no business there. Anyone reading the file in ten years would see her money and Fermín's stamp and connect them. She put the chequebook back in the drawer.
She'd bring Vega to the St. Vincent de Paul conference on Thursday instead. The conference paid light bills and funerals, and once, for the Ochoa twins, a swamp-cooler motor. Let them decide whether a gravity survey was a need. It was a parish question, not a notary's.
Then the reply. She wrote it longhand first, as always, and kept it to what could be checked.
1. A 20 m default assumes all water within 2 m of the sensor. Phoenix lots routinely carry perched water over caliche at 4 to 8 m, and slab leaks under deep footings sit in the same range. There the true 90% radius is 40 to 80 m. A default makes that error a stated fact.
2. Legacy certificates stated no radius, but they were read at one. Every rating model read them at its own kernel, which for Desert Mutual was 60 m. Legacy practice was the kernel's radius, not the notary's. A 20 m default replaces one unstated number with another.
3. Legacy certificates are not lost. They remain true for what they measured: each lot against its own dry history, at the posts. They never measured the valley, and they never measured a radius. A legacy series may be supported by re-occupation with a tie under item 5. The undersigned holds three such and will re-occupy one this week at her own cost.
4. If a default is adopted over this objection, it should be zero.
She read item 3 twice. It committed her. Mr. Soto was in her book and still lived on 43rd Avenue. She'd have to phone a man at eight in the morning and ask for a night on his property, which would cost her a night's sleep and the filing fee and get her a filled field and nothing else.
She signed it. #118.
4/6 NO CHEQUE (MY SERIES ON HER TILE). VEGA TO SVDP THURS. REPLY: DEFAULT ZERO OR NONE. RE-OCCUPY SOTO, MY COST. CALL 8 AM.
Wednesday
Mr. Soto said yes at five past eight. Then he asked, "Is something wrong with my house?"
"No," she said. "Nothing I know of. A paper of yours is missing a number."
At eleven that night he'd left coffee in a thermos on the back step with a cup turned over the top, and gone to bed.
The nail was where she'd set it in October 2046, east of the citrus, a brass head gone brown. Her thumb found it before the flashlight did. Head on the tripod. Sensor height by steel tape: 0.31 m above the nail. She wrote that down before anything else, because it was the number she hadn't written down in 2046, and the one Mateo would ask for first at any hearing.
Six posts, the old pattern, run in the 2046 order so the numbers would fall into the same columns. A cooler next door cycled at 1:20, logged. A dog. A freight on the Grand Avenue line at 3:05, logged. Between posts the head ticked in its case, the same tick it had made over this nail in 2046, before anybody read a certificate from across the street.
At 05:40 she closed on the base and sat on the step with the coffee, cold by then and very sweet.
She started to difference the night against the 2046 dry median, out of habit, and stopped with the pencil on the paper. That median was untied. Two and a half years of the valley's pumping were inside it, and the head's own drift, and she couldn't swear 7716 had been the head that October. It was the same subtraction she'd refused on Friday. She crossed out the column header.
What one night could say honestly was post against post, with the regional term common to all six and cancelling. Post 4, under the citrus, against the mean of the other five: +0.1 µGal. The other five scattered within 0.1 of each other. Nothing above noise. Fermín's two nights, one dry and one wet, could have shown a difference. One night couldn't.
Mr. Soto watered the citrus by hose on Sundays, he'd told her on the phone. The block's well log put the water table at 41 m, far below anything a lawn could feel. The only water she could name was the citrus basin, wetted to perhaps 0.9 m.
Depth below the sensor: 0.9 plus 0.31. Ten times that was twelve.
She filled the field on the tablet.
Support: 12 m, posts 1–6. Tied: Papago, 4/5/2049, −1.9 µGal, 18.9 km, head 7716. Re-occupation of 10/2046 series. Post-to-post, 4/7–8 night; 2046 median not comparable. No residual above noise. Water named: citrus basin, hose, Sundays, ~0.9 m.
Twelve metres. The lot was eighteen wide. The radius didn't reach the block wall. It didn't come from the size of anything she'd measured, because she'd measured nothing. It came from how deep the only named water sat. The night had shown nothing, and the field filled anyway. Last week a model had been ready to read this certificate across two streets. Tonight it said nothing was there, and how far that nothing went.
Mr. Soto came out at six in his slippers, saw the tripod folded, and asked if it was good news.
"It's a small number," she said. "That's the good news."
He nodded as if she'd told him something about his health. He went back inside, then came out again with a bag of oranges for her grandmother.
She wrote the card on the hood of the car, oranges on the seat.
4/7–8 SOTO RE-OCCUPIED. 7716, H 0.31. TIE 4/5. POST-TO-POST ONLY, NOTHING ABOVE NOISE. 2046 MEDIAN STRUCK. SUPPORT 12 M FROM THE CITRUS DEPTH. FIRST LEGACY SERIES WITH A RADIUS. 2 TO GO. 4,097 NOT MINE.
Then she sat for a while with the engine off. One night, one lot, a sixty-dollar filing fee and a sleepless Wednesday, and the field was full on one certificate out of four thousand one hundred. Desert Mutual's twenty metres would cost nobody anything, fill every one of them by lunchtime, and be wrong where it mattered. Hers would take the rest of her working life and still not get through them all.
She started the car. She had Mass to get to, and Abuela would want the oranges before the heat.