"She can tell them whatever she likes. You have the documents. So do they."
He looked over his shoulder toward the colonial. "I suppose we do."
I did not attend the meeting. I was not afraid of facing Patricia, and I was not trying to create an air of impartial superiority by staying home. I simply believed the neighbors needed to reach a conclusion in a room where they could argue freely about their own conduct. If I sat there in silence, every sentence might become a response to my presence. If I spoke, Patricia would say a judge was intimidating the association. The cleanest thing I could do was remove myself from the center.
So I mowed the lawn.
The mower crossed the grass in regular stripes while voices rose and fell from the direction of the clubhouse. The afternoon smelled of cut grass and warm concrete. Once, when I stopped to empty the bag, I could hear applause from somewhere near the pool. I could not tell what it meant and did not try. It was their meeting, and they had a right to conduct it without an audience standing in the doorway.
Dale came over after supper.
The sunlight had begun to turn orange, laying a long shadow across the driveway where Patricia's motor home used to stand. I was cleaning the mower blade when he approached the fence and rested his hands on the rail. His face was flushed, and he had the expression of someone who had spent more emotional energy in an hour than he usually spent in a month.
"Well," he said, "that was something."
I put down the rag. "You want a glass of water?"
"I might need something stronger, but water will do."
I brought him a glass, and we stood in the yard while he told me what had happened. The meeting had been properly called, and a quorum had attended. Bev moved to remove Patricia from the presidency. The vote did not happen immediately, because Patricia asked to address the members and the chair allowed her to speak. For eleven years she had organized the holiday decorations, negotiated small landscaping bills, and kept association gatherings running. She was not wrong that much of that work had been useful.
According to Dale, she reminded the room of every service she had arranged. She mentioned Bev's rides to church, the convenience of the lights, the shared pressure washer, and the money saved by not renting an outside storage unit. She described me as the man who had arrived after a decade of community life and swept those arrangements away because he wanted every inch of pavement for himself. It was a familiar account, but this time she had to say it before people who had seen her mower, pool tile, and lounger displayed beside the supposed community equipment.
"Half the room went quiet," Dale said. "Not because they thought she was right about the driveway. Because we liked what she gave us. We really did."
He looked at the glass in his hand. "I used that cart for three years. I knew it was sitting in somebody's garage, but I never once asked who gave permission. I decided not asking was the same as not needing to know."
"What did you say?"