I don't fully know how word got around. Ozzie, probably. Ines Arreola, certainly; she'd stood in my driveway on Monday with the baby on her hip and said, "You ran a cord to my house so my kids wouldn't cook, and that woman put a picture of it in a violation letter? Oh, I'm coming." And I suspect Glenda's own post on the neighborhood social page, from the week before, had done some of the work for me. It had said that the Board had "taken decisive action to stop the theft of Association power by a resident" and that "your dues are not a free charging station." It had a lot of comments. Not all of them were the kind Glenda wanted.
The folding chairs filled up and then people stood along the back wall. Some of them waved at me. One man by the coffee urn muttered "there she is," and not in a friendly way, and I thought, that's fair. Until a week ago, all anybody had heard was Glenda's side.
The board sat at a long table at the front: Glenda in the middle, Lamont at one end with his laptop, Tamsin Whitlow, the secretary, with her minutes binder, and two members-at-large I knew mostly by their golf carts. Tamsin was Glenda's closest friend on the board, a retired schoolteacher with silver bangles, and she wouldn't meet my eye when I came in.
I sat in the front row with my binder, my lawyer, and my witnesses. The lawyer, Cassidy Reinholt, did HOA work out of San Marcos and had, on Tuesday, sent the Association a four-page letter pointing out that Chapter 209 of the Texas Property Code requires an association, before it fines or takes enforcement action against an owner, to send written notice by certified mail describing the violation, stating the amount, giving a reasonable period to cure, and telling the owner they have the right to request a hearing before the board. None of which had happened. The letter also used the words "conversion" and "trespass" more than once, in a tone that I would describe as pleasant but load-bearing.
Tomás sat on my left in his co-op polo, holding a folder and looking like a man waiting for a root canal. Arlette Nakamura sat on my right, a small, cheerful woman in her fifties with a city ID badge on a lanyard and a tablet in her lap.
Glenda called the meeting to order at 7:02, pressed and prepared, and for the first twenty minutes she ran it beautifully. She explained the Association's fiduciary duty. She put the bill numbers up on the projector: nine-forty a month last year, twenty-seven hundred this August. She put up the picture of my extension cord across the Arreolas' lawn. She put up the picture of my house, lit up like a cruise ship during the May blackout, taken from the street. And then she put up the picture of my meter socket, the blank plate, the seal, enlarged to fill the whole screen.
"This home has no meter," she said. "The co-op confirms there is no active account at this address. Yet, as you can see, it had full power during an outage that affected every other home in this community. I'll let you draw your own conclusions."
There was a murmur. I heard somebody behind me say, "Well, that does look bad."
"Ms. Sundquist," Glenda said. "You've asked to respond. You have ten minutes."
I stood up. I'm not a public speaker. So I did it the way I'd have run a tailboard briefing before a job: say what we're doing, say what's live, say who's doing what.
"Everything Glenda just showed you is true," I said. "There's no meter on my house. I don't have an account with the co-op. My house had power when yours didn't. And I ran extension cords across two lawns. I'm going to show you why all four of those things are true, and then I'm going to show you where your money's actually going. Tomás?"