Her husband then was a man named Bartholomew, an orthodontist, cheerful and loud, who played golf and drank expensive bourbon and who always seemed slightly surprised to find himself married to her. I never liked him much. I never said so.
Things fell apart between Ottoline and me five years ago, in the spring that Hesper and Dashiell were twelve, and it was my fault. Mostly my fault. I've spent a long time trying to figure out the percentages, and I land somewhere around seventy-thirty, me.
That spring, Ottoline was running for her second term as HOA president, and I, for reasons that seem incomprehensible now, decided to run against her. The board had fined Mrs. Marvella Okereke on Aster Court four hundred dollars for leaving her Christmas lights up until March, when everybody knew Marvella's husband had just had a stroke and there was no one to get on a ladder. It made me furious. I made a flyer. I knocked on doors. I said things at the candidates' night in the clubhouse that I had rehearsed in the shower and that sounded righteous in my head and cruel out loud.
And on the porch of the clubhouse afterward, with a cup of bad decaf in my hand and three neighbors standing around me laughing, I said the sentence. I'd had a long day. I was riding the high of having gotten applause. Someone asked what I thought Ottoline would do if she won, and I said, "Ottoline would fine her own kid for breathing too loud. That poor girl's going to grow up thinking love is a list of violations."
People laughed. It was a good line, the kind of line that gets repeated.
It got repeated.
It got repeated, specifically, to Hesper, who was twelve and who was sitting on the clubhouse steps around the corner, waiting for her mother, with a library book open on her knees. I didn't know she was there. I didn't find out until two days later, when Ottoline came to my door, not with a letter but in person, red-eyed, and said, very quietly, "She asked me if it was true. She asked me if I love her like a list." And then she turned around and walked back across her own yard, and that was, more or less, the last real conversation we had for five years.
I lost the election by thirty-one votes. I deserved to. I wrote Ottoline an apology note and put it in her mailbox, and I never heard back, and I didn't blame her. The fence between our yards stayed a fence. The kids, who had been tossing balls over it since they were five, stopped. I assumed it was natural. Kids drift. Middle school happens. Hesper went into the advanced track and the orchestra and the debate team, and Dashiell went into band and the robotics club and a long, sullen silence that lasted most of eighth grade, and I thought they'd simply grown into different people.