"I tried to call you," he said. "Twice. Yesterday. You didn't pick up."
"I was at Darlene's. My sister. Her knee." I hadn't checked my phone much. Darlene is not a woman who lets you look at your phone when she has a new knee to tell you about. "What happened, Oz?"
Ozzie Stanek is seventy-eight, a retired Army motor sergeant, a widower, and the best neighbor I've ever had. He was wearing his summer uniform: a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and the white compression socks his doctor makes him wear and that he hates with a passion worthy of a better cause.
"Wednesday," he said. "Around ten in the morning. Box truck and a pickup. Four fellas in matching shirts. And her."
He didn't have to say who her was.
"She stood right there by your gate," he said, "with a clipboard, like she was directing traffic at a Fourth of July parade. I came out and asked what in the Sam Hill they thought they were doing, and she told me it was Association business and I should go back inside for my own safety. My own safety. I did two tours, Rae. I have been in actual danger. I know what it looks like, and it does not look like Glenda Ashworth in a sun visor."
"Did they go in the house?"
"No. Not that I saw. Just the backyard. They wheeled everything out the gate and up a ramp into the truck. Took them about forty minutes." He held up the phone. "But I got it. Doorbell camera, and I recorded the whole business on this thing too. My grandson set it up so it goes to the cloud. I don't know where the cloud is, but it's in there."
"Ozzie," I said, "I could kiss you."
"Don't you dare," he said. "My wife, rest her, would come back and haunt the both of us." Then he lowered the phone, and his face changed. "There's one more thing. Before they loaded up, she walked around the side of your house. The east side. Where your electric thing is. She took about twenty pictures of it. Close up. Like it was a crime scene."
The east side of my house is where the meter used to be.
There's still a meter socket there, a gray steel can with a round opening, but there's no meter in it. There hasn't been since April of 2022. There's a blank cover plate over the opening, a flat steel disk with a stamped co-op logo and a numbered seal through the ring, and that's all. A lot of people never notice it at all. People who notice it usually assume the meter has been removed for repair.