Monica Hayes walked the depot floor before the shift, as she did every morning, starting at the front door. A car was idling in the lot. A man about her age got out with his keys still in his hand, went to the screen beside the door, and pressed like. He stood looking at the number a moment, the way people did, then got back in his car and drove off toward Mack Avenue. At the painted wall Monica checked the tally page on her phone. The count had taken his vote. The paint marked where the reading corner used to be. A low shelf had run along that wall when the building was Marsh Elementary, and the painters had left the outline of it in a lighter blue. The forklifts parked in a row past the outline, their forks lowered, their keys in a lockbox by the door that had once led to the principal's office.
The tally page was the school's sign-in sheet, kept open after the school closed. Anyone could open it and press like or dislike. A like added one to the count. The count went nowhere else. It changed no decision. No audit read the page, and nothing official depended on it. Halden was not tearing the building down. It already ran the depot inside it.
The count stood at 11,204 likes, gathered across the nine years since the school closed.
She had learned to read at the shelf whose outline was still on the wall. The room where she learned was now Bay 2, and the trucks backed into it through a door cut into the east wall in the year after the sale. She did not stop at the outline. She walked to the lockbox, took out the keys, and set them on the shift board in the order of the bays.
The rezoning notice was waiting in her locker, in an envelope from the planning commission. Halden Logistics already ran the depot in the building. It wanted the parcel rezoned so it could add a second truck bay and run overnight staging. The building stood two blocks north of Mack Avenue, in East English Village, on Detroit's east side. The hearing was Thursday. The letter asked the building's operator to appear as a witness. The operator's name on the depot's shift board was Monica Hayes. She read the letter twice, folded it, put it back in the envelope, and put the envelope in her locker.
At nine Esther Cole came into the break room with a paper bag. Esther had been the school librarian, and she kept the tally page. She had kept it since the school closed, first as a sign-in sheet in the school's last spring, then as a page anyone could open, with a screen by the front door for people who came in person. She set the bag on the break room table and took out a book with a cloth spine.
"The first entries are in here," Esther said. She opened the book to the first page. "Three thousand names. Alumni. When the doors closed, we copied the sign-in sheets onto the page."
Monica looked at the page. The handwriting changed down the columns, one hand after another, in ink that had faded to brown at the top of the first sheet.
"Nobody closed the page," Esther said. "So people kept pressing it."
"People still come here to vote?" Monica said.
"They are not deciding anything," Esther said. "They come to the door. They press the screen. Some of them press it and then stand in the lot a minute. Then they drive away."
Monica closed the book and gave it back. Esther put it in the bag and left through the front door, past the screen. The screen showed the same number as Monica's phone: 11,204 likes, and below it, 311 dislikes. The dislikes had been there since the last spring, most of them pressed in the weeks when the closing was still being fought, by people who had voted against it and never changed their votes.
Monica was back at the shift board after lunch when Ray Kowalski arrived with a letter of his own. Ray was Halden's site man. He wore a clean shirt and carried a folder, and he waited until the shift's lunch break was over before he asked Monica to step into the small room off Bay 1 that served as her office.
"A handover bonus," he said, and he laid the letter on the desk. "Four thousand dollars. Payable on the rezoning's approval."
Monica read the letter. The bonus was tied to a clean handover: a new page for the depot, under the depot's name, starting at zero. The school's page would close, and its count would go with it.
"Who writes the new page?" Monica said.
"We do," Ray said. "Halden. It will count the depot. Shifts, deliveries, the things people here actually use the building for now."
Monica put the letter in her locker, next to the commission's envelope. She did not sign it. Ray did not ask her to sign it there. He left the folder on the desk and went back to his car.
On Wednesday her brother Darnell found her at the shift board. Darnell drove a forklift on her shift. He had started at Marsh six years behind her, in a classroom two doors down from the one where she learned to read.
"The crew is voting on the page," he said.
"On the school's page?" Monica said.
"From the break room," Darnell said. "Likes for a shift that ends on time. Dislikes for the bay door that sticks in Bay 2. Somebody voted dislike three times for the coffee machine."
Monica looked at the break room. Two drivers sat at the table with their phones out. One of them pressed his screen and laughed.
"Tell them to stop?" Darnell said.
Monica shook her head. "They can press it if they want. It records whatever comes in."
That afternoon she went downtown to the clerk's office and asked what a witness at a rezoning hearing was allowed to read. The clerk was a young man with a stack of agendas on his desk. He found the rule in a binder and read it aloud, then wrote it down on a slip of paper for her: a witness may read any record into the hearing, and the reading binds nothing. Monica took the paper and put it in her locker with the two letters.
On Thursday morning she checked the page once more before she left for the hearing. The count stood at 11,204. The dislikes stood at 311. She drove downtown in her own car and sat in the hearing room in the second row, with the book in her bag. Esther had left the book with her the night before, at her kitchen table, without any instruction about what to do with it.
The commissioners heard Halden's presentation first. Ray spoke about the second bay and the overnight staging and the number of trucks the parcel could hold. He spoke about jobs. The number he gave for the depot's crew was thirty-eight, and Monica counted the crew in her head as he said it and got the same number. She had hired eleven of them herself, from streets within walking distance of the building, and three of them had gone to Marsh.
When her name was called, she walked to the witness table with the book and the clerk's paper. She set the paper down first, then the book, then her phone, face up, showing the page.
"I manage the depot in the Marsh building," she said. "I went to school in that building. The page for the building stands at eleven thousand two hundred and four likes."
She read the book's first line, the date at the top of the first sheet and the first name under it, in the hand of a woman who had signed in during the school's last spring. She said the page began as a sign-in sheet and people kept adding to it after the sale.
"I am also reading the depot's count," she said. "The crew has been voting from the break room. Likes for a shift that ends on time. Dislikes for a bay door that sticks. I am reading it separately, because it is a second count in the same building's name, and it should not be mixed with the first."
She sat down. The commissioners asked her two questions about truck hours and one about the staging lot's fence. She answered all three with numbers from the depot's own schedule. The commission approved the rezoning with a condition on overnight staging hours: no arrivals between eleven at night and five in the morning.
Ray waited for her in the hallway. He did not mention the letter. He said the condition was workable and that Halden would adjust the schedule. He shook her hand the way he always did, with his folder under his arm.
On Friday the handover bonus did not arrive. Monica checked her pay stub at the shift board and found her regular wages and nothing else. She put the stub in her locker, next to the commission's envelope and the clerk's paper and Ray's unsigned letter.
After the last truck was docked, she sat at the desk in the small room off Bay 1 with the credit union statement that had come that week. The furnace loan stood at $3,940. She had meant to clear it in one payment when the bonus came.
She took Ray's letter out of her locker and turned it over. On the back she wrote the months in a column, November through October, and beside each month the same figure: $330. Twelve lines. The last payment would come out smaller, and she wrote that in too: $310. She drew a line through the first month, wrote a check for $330, and sealed it in an envelope. She put the letter back in her locker with the schedule facing out.
A month later, on the Friday the stubs came out, she checked hers at the shift board and found regular wages. Before she left, she took Ray's letter from her locker, crossed off the second month on the back, and wrote the second check at the desk in the small room. She sealed it in an envelope and put the letter back in the locker, next to the commission's envelope and the clerk's paper.
After the shift she went to the break room and opened the new depot page on the break room screen. Halden had built it the week of the hearing, under the depot's name, starting at zero, and it had stood at zero since. She stood at the screen and entered the first vote herself: a like, for a shift that ended on time. The number moved from zero to one.
She walked out through the front door, past the school's screen, and on to her car. The lot was empty except for the trucks. Behind her, the school's screen showed 11,204.