"You told me it was like a gaming computer," Glenda said. Her voice was very small. "You said two hundred watts. You said it was like leaving a lamp on."
"I didn't think anybody would..." He stopped. He looked at the crowd. At Lamont. At me. And all the fight seemed to go out of him at once, and he just looked tired, and young, and like somebody who'd been awake for a very long time.
Glenda turned to the crowd, and I'll remember what she said for the rest of my life, because it was the first completely honest thing I'd ever heard her say.
"He hadn't gotten out of bed in five weeks," she said. "His company went under in February. He lost his apartment. He came home and he just lay there. And then he found this thing on the internet, and he got excited about something for the first time since Christmas, and he asked me if he could plug it in somewhere I wouldn't have to see it on our bill, because Lonnie would ask. And I had the key." She swallowed. "I knew it was something. I didn't know it was this. And when Lamont started asking about the bill, I thought, if I can just get through until the price goes up, and he pays it back, and nobody..." She looked at me, finally. "And you were the one who'd heard it. In April. You were the one person in this neighborhood who would know exactly what it was the minute you walked in that door. So I made sure nobody would believe you if you did."
Nobody said anything for a long moment. The cicadas went on.
"I'm sorry about your freezer," Glenda Ashworth said to me, and then she put her hand over her mouth and walked away up the gravel drive in the dark, toward her golf cart, and her son, after a moment, went after her.
XI.
The rest of it took about six weeks, and most of it happened on paper, which is where these things usually end up.
At an emergency meeting the following Monday, the board, with Lamont presiding, rescinded every fine on my account, voted to retroactively disavow the self-help action as unauthorized, paid Rusty Ferrell's invoice out of the Association's legal reserve, and agreed to reimburse Cassidy Reinholt's fees. Tamsin Whitlow read a formal apology into the minutes. She read it standing up, and her voice shook, and afterward she came over and squeezed my hand and said, "I should have asked. I've known her twenty years and I never once asked her anything," which was its own kind of apology, and the one I believed more.
Glenda resigned as president by email on Sunday night, before the recall petition Ines Arreola had started on Friday morning could reach the signatures it needed. It already had ninety-one. Ines showed it to me anyway, a little proudly, and I told her she should frame it, and she said she just might.
Boone sold the four miners online within two weeks, to a man in Midland who drove down and picked them up in a horse trailer. They brought in a little over half of what he'd paid. All told, after six and a half months of roaring away in a cinder block room behind the pool, they had earned him about four thousand dollars' worth of cryptocurrency, while burning almost ten thousand dollars' worth of other people's electricity. He signed a repayment agreement with the Association for the full nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy dollars, with Glenda as co-signer: the miner money up front, and the rest at four hundred a month. Lamont drafted it himself. He told me that it was the first time in forty years he'd felt sorry for the person on the other side of a ledger.