He closed his eyes. "I was at the fence," he said. "It's not the same."
"It's going to be the same to Ottoline Vandersloot."
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and sat there like that for a long time, long enough that Pickle woke up and looked at him and put her chin on his knee. And then he said the thing that made the floor tilt under me, a thing I wasn't remotely ready for.
"I have to talk to Hesper first," he said. "Before I tell you. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. But it's not just mine to tell."
I need to back up and explain some things about Thistlewood Commons, and about Ottoline, and about me, because none of this happened in a vacuum. Very little in an HOA does. An HOA is like a small town that was designed by a committee and then left out in the rain, and every grudge in it has a history that goes back further than anyone admits.
Thistlewood Commons is ninety-one houses on the north side of Sunbury, Ohio, built in 2004 on what used to be a soybean field. There are six court names, all flowers: Larkspur, Foxglove, Aster, Bellflower, Tansy, and Yarrow. There's a clubhouse with a pool that's open from Memorial Day to Labor Day, a playground with the kind of rubber mulch that gets in your shoes, and a retention pond that the developer called Thistlewood Lake on the original sign, which everybody laughed at, and which Ottoline had, in her second year as president, replaced with a new sign that just said Thistlewood Pond, because, as she put it in the newsletter, honesty in signage is the foundation of a trustworthy community. I remember thinking that was the most Ottoline sentence ever written, and I still think so. I also, now, think she half meant it in a way I didn't understand at the time.
I moved into 9 Foxglove Court twelve years ago with my husband, Wystan, and our five-year-old son. Foxglove backs up against Larkspur. My backyard shares a fence, a six-foot cedar privacy fence that the HOA requires everyone to stain a color called Weathered Pewter every four years, with the backyard of 14 Larkspur. The Vandersloots had moved in about a month before we did. Their daughter, Hesper, was five, too. The two kids met through the fence slats the first week, when Dashiell's ball went over, and Hesper threw it back, and then threw it back again the next time, and the next, until it was a game, and the game went on most of that summer.
Ottoline and I were friends, then. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easier to tell this story if she'd always been a cartoon villain with a clipboard. She wasn't. She was a thin, tense, funny woman who worked in compliance for an insurance company in downtown Columbus and who knew the name of every plant in her yard in Latin. She brought us a lasagna when we moved in. When Wystan's mother died that first winter, Ottoline watched Dashiell for three days while we drove to Indiana for the funeral, and when we came back she had taught him to make paper cranes, and he had made forty of them, and she had strung them on fishing line and hung them in his window. I still have them in a box in the basement.