"I thought I'd stopped it. I thought I'd stopped it the week after the clubhouse. I told her, That family is not our friends anymore, and she said, Okay, Mom, and I thought that was the end of it, because she always said okay." Ottoline shook her head slowly. "She never said okay. She said okay and then she went and did exactly what she wanted, very quietly, in a way I'd never catch. Do you know who she learned that from?"
"Bartholomew?"
"Me," said Ottoline Vandersloot. "She learned it from me."
Ermengarde Quarrington called a special meeting of the board for the following Tuesday at seven in the clubhouse. The notice went out by email on Saturday morning, and by Saturday afternoon it was in the neighborhood Facebook group, because Ermengarde's sister-in-law runs the neighborhood Facebook group. The notice said only: Agenda item one: review of a recent enforcement request by the President and related conduct concerns. Open to all residents. But the comments under it filled in the rest, with the cheerful, vicious speed of people who have been bored all summer. Someone had heard there was footage. Someone had heard it was about a teenager. Someone, under a profile picture of a sunset over Lake Erie, wrote: HOA Karen finally went too far, lol, and seventeen people liked it.
I didn't comment. I wanted to. My thumbs actually hovered over the screen. And then I put my phone face down on the counter and went and cleaned the lint trap on my bad dryer instead, because I had learned, that week, at some cost, what happens to words once you let them out.
Dashiell asked me on Sunday whether he should go to the meeting.
"Do you want to?"
"Hesper's going," he said. "She says she's going to speak. She won't tell me what she's going to say. She says it's hers."