Election Day 5:59 am

Val and Pete, Election Inspectors, District 11, one Republican and one Democrat as required by law, sat at a heavy folding table in an upstate firehouse awaiting the health aides, Walmart shift workers, and DPW guys who always lined up to vote first thing.

Val, Pete, and the team of volunteers from District 12 had completed the familiar drill of turning the room where volunteer firefighters met, pancake breakfast fundraisers were served up, and seniors played bingo, into a polling place.

They’d opened the tables, dragged them to one side of the room, arranged red, white, and blue privacy screens, and posted VOTE HERE signs outside. They’d pushed two bulky, black voting machines into place, plugged cables into the correct ports and outlets, inserted security keys, and zeroed out the machines. They’d removed the plastic wrap from reams of numbered ballots, zipped open special bags that held official forms, and checked and rechecked every detail. Last of all, they’d moved the station’s parade-size American flag into position.

Solemn tasks. Sacred tasks.

There was a brief respite before the polls opened. Val fluffed her halo of apricot-dyed hair. Pete stretched, hands behind his balding head. After being teamed up for two-plus decades of elections, they knew the bones of each other’s lives, although the meat was a bit more uncertain. Political talk was off-limits, so while they waited for the day to begin, they caught up on this and that as usual.

Val asked Pete how his tree service business was going, and if his son — Blake, was it? — ever married that girl from Coxsackie whose dad was a C.O. at the prison, and how Pete’s wife was doing. Pete stared into his coffee cup and said Linda had passed, cancer, no hospice, no way, he’d gone to make her tea, come back, and she was gone, and yes, Blake and Denise were married, but he wasn’t sure for how long.

Pete asked Val if she was still going to St. Ignatius every Sunday, and if she knew whatever happened to that poll worker, Theresa. Val said she figured Theresa couldn’t take one more day of smiling, explaining, and staying focused on details for sixteen hours straight. And where the hell were the young folks, anyway?

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