"Then I think you should go," I said, "and sit next to her, and not say anything unless she asks you to."
He nodded. Then he said, "Mom, are you going to say something?"
"Yes," I said.
"About what?"
"About the clubhouse porch," I said. "Five years late."
On Monday, a repair technician from an appliance company in Delaware, Ohio, parked a van in front of 14 Larkspur for two hours. I know this because the neighborhood Facebook group knew it. I also know, because Hesper told Dashiell and Dashiell told me, that Ottoline had not put it on a credit card. Radhika had come over Sunday night with a check. Not a loan from Radhika herself, exactly. It turned out that eleven years ago, when the HOA was first set up, the developer had created something called the Thistlewood Neighbor Fund, a small emergency account meant to help residents with repairs during hardship, and the board had simply forgotten it existed, and it had been sitting in a credit union in Sunbury accruing a fraction of a percent of interest for over a decade, untouched. Radhika had found it in July, going through old records for the audit. She'd meant to bring it up at a meeting. She'd never found the right moment. When she found out about the washer, she said, the moment had found her.
Ottoline accepted the money. That, I think, was the hardest thing she did all week. Harder than the meeting. She accepted it, and she wrote a thank-you note to Radhika on the cream-colored letterhead with the little embossed oak leaf, and she filed a copy with the HOA records, so it would be on paper.
The clubhouse on Tuesday night was fuller than I had ever seen it. Fuller than for the vote on the pool hours, fuller than for the fight over whether to allow solar panels on street-facing roofs. People stood along the back wall. The folding chairs ran out by 6:50 and Radhika had to drag a stack more out of the storage closet. Mrs. Okereke came with her husband in his wheelchair and parked him at the end of the second row. Dashiell and Hesper sat together on the left side, near the front, with a careful three inches between them, and Hesper had a single index card in her lap that she kept turning over and over.