He read them to her on her own front step. The witness to that moment was Lucía, who had gone back out to the sidewalk "to pick Nell's flyers up off her lawn, Mom, I'm being helpful," and was close enough to hear.
"She didn't cry or anything," Lucía told me afterward in my garage, unusually quiet. "She just sat there. When he said 'possession,' she sort of looked down at her hands. Like she was checking whether they were still hers."
* * *
I didn't feel triumphant that night. People expect you to when you tell this story. They want a bottle of champagne and a little dance in the kitchen. Instead I went out into my backyard at sunset and stood among the kenaf. Most of the flowers had gone over, and round, hairy seed pods were forming at the tops of the stalks. The red light beside the lens on Darlene's deck camera was dark for the first time in a month.
Up on the deck, Rick Fisk sat alone in a patio chair with nothing in his hands, looking west. Even from my yard I could tell he wasn't seeing the mountains either.
I went inside and wrote it all down, with the date and time at the top, and put it in the binder. Then I slept for eleven hours, which I had not done in two months.
* * *
The recall was Gus's idea, Marisol's paperwork, and Lucía's legwork.
Article IV, Section 6 of the bylaws said a director could be removed, with or without cause, by a majority of the members present at a special meeting, and that such a meeting could be called by petition of twenty percent of the membership. Twenty percent of a hundred and forty homes was twenty-eight signatures. Lucía, who is fourteen and cannot vote, which did not slow her down in the slightest, went door to door with a clipboard and her mother. In five afternoons they came back with eighty-six.
"Hal Brennan asked if he could sign twice," she reported. "Because of the arborvitae."
The petition also named Sharon Pike and the board secretary, Tom Gallo. Trevor at the management company had discovered a sudden passion for sharing documents, and the documents showed that no vote of the board had ever been taken on my five-hundred-dollar fine. Tom Gallo resigned by email the day the petition was filed, in two sentences. Sharon Pike asked to speak at the meeting.
The meeting was held on Thursday, October 22nd, at seven, in the clubhouse by the pool, with the same coffee urn and the same highlighter cookies. A hundred and twenty-one households were represented, in person or by proxy, and Trevor had to borrow chairs from a church.