He stared at the grass. "I stood up. I hate speaking in meetings, but I stood up. I told them I had a garage and a driveway too. I told them that if I spent a winter with my sister in Arizona, I wouldn't want to come home to find a calendar taped to my door."
He stopped and shook his head at himself.
"That's all I had. Bev said yes. Then Okafor said yes. After that people started talking about how the arrangement looked from your side. Not from Trish's side, not from the cart's side. From yours."
The motion passed fourteen to three.
Dale told me the remaining officers were instructed to review the association's property arrangements, verify which shared items actually belonged to the association, and withdraw the unsupported notices concerning my driveway. The board would arrange lawful storage for the decorations and the cart. Patricia disputed the process and said she would consult an attorney, which she was entitled to do. The members nevertheless had made their decision under the bylaws as Dale understood them.
"Did she say anything afterward?" I asked.
"She said we'd regret it. Then she left."
He drank the last of the water. I expected him to smile, or to say it was over. He did neither. He looked down the street toward his house and said, "I think I've spent three years enjoying something that made other people miserable. I didn't mean to. But that's not much of a defense, is it?"
"It's the beginning of a better one," I said.
Dale considered that for a while, then nodded and walked home. The ceramic geese were still facing his front door, where his wife had turned them during the week when he was uncertain how to behave toward me. Before he went inside, he bent down and rotated both of them toward the road. I watched him do it without letting him know I was watching.
The following Monday a shoebox appeared on my porch.
It was an ordinary brown shoebox, its lid held closed by a length of string. There was no note. Inside, nested in a folded dish towel, lay nine gray garage remotes, some newer than others, each with a little clip that had once fitted onto a car visor. I counted them twice. Nine households, nine devices that had opened my private garage for years and that no longer had the power to open anything at all.
Nobody had demanded that the remotes be returned. The locksmith had made them useless. There was no practical need to put them on my porch. I understood the gesture anyway. It was the closest some of the neighbors could come to acknowledging that they had accepted something they were not entitled to use. Returning a useless object can be a meaningful act when the object once represented permission nobody had the right to give.
I took the box into the kitchen and set it beside the folder of notices. For a long time I simply stood there looking at it. I would have welcomed an apology. I would also have found a spoken apology difficult, because the temptation to say "It doesn't matter" would have been strong, and it did matter. Nine people had been willing to open my garage while its previous owners struggled to make the behavior stop. I did not want to erase that fact merely because the people had finally understood it.