"Retired teacher," I said. "Biology. I take pictures of trees."
"Of trees," she repeated, as though I'd said I collected toenails.
"For a university project."
"Hm." She tapped the binder. "Section 7.4. No commercial activity in the home. And we do ask that people respect each other's privacy." Another smile. "We've had problems before."
I didn't think anything of it. I thought she was one of those women — I had taught alongside a few of them, served on committees with more — for whom the world was a set of rules that only she had read, and who mistook the reading for authority. I signed the acknowledgment form. She took the shortbread back, I noticed later. Or maybe I'd imagined there being shortbread. That's the kind of thing you start doing, once Karen Whitcombe has been in your life a while.
For two years she was a weather system I lived beside. Violation notices went out, and the neighbors grumbled. Trash cans visible from the street. A basketball hoop left in a driveway overnight. A front door painted a shade of blue that was, according to the Architectural Committee — which consisted of Karen — not on the approved palette, even though it was the same shade as the door three houses down. People paid the fines, painted the doors, moved the cans. Karen drove through the neighborhood twice a day in a white Lexus SUV at about eleven miles an hour. Sometimes she stopped and took pictures with a big camera, a black Nikon with a long gray lens.
"She's the Gestapo," Gus said once, at the pin oak.
"She's bored," I said.
"Bored people start wars," Gus said, and he handed me my coffee.
I thought he was being dramatic. Gus was dramatic about the Detroit Lions, too.
He wasn't being dramatic.