"It's not a preference."
"Mr. Benedetti." She took her glasses out of her hair and folded them. "My generation didn't have all these allergies. Nobody walked around with needles in a fanny pack. I raised a son. He ate peanut butter every day of his life. I think a lot of this is anxious parenting, frankly, and I think children pick it up. I'm not a doctor. But I'm the president of this Association, and the rules are the rules."
There's a thing that happens in my hands when I'm angry. They go very still. My father had it. You can't hold a quill brush steady for a hairline with your heart going like a paint shaker, so at some point in your apprenticeship your hands learn to go quiet no matter what the rest of you is doing, and after a while they do it on their own, at the dinner table, in traffic, in a pool office with a woman calling your daughter a drug user. I put them flat on the desk, on either side of the clipboard, and I picked up the two pens and put them back into their tubes, one and then the other, and capped the tubes, and slid them back into the sloth pouch, and zipped it, and handed it to my daughter. Verlene watched me do it and didn't stop me.
"There'll be a violation notice," she said.
"Send it," I said. "Clem, let's go."
The notice came on Tuesday, in a cream envelope with the Meadowlark Commons logo on it, a little line drawing of a bird on a fencepost. Fifty dollars. Violation of Rules 9.2 and 11.4. Unapproved food and container on pool deck; possession of sharps/medical paraphernalia in pool enclosure. Repeat violations may result in suspension of amenity privileges.
I went to the board meeting the following Thursday. I brought a letter from Clem's allergist on Children's Mercy letterhead, and a copy of her school action plan, and the Kansas statute about students carrying epinephrine printed off the legislature's website, which didn't technically apply to an HOA pool but which I thought made a point. Five board members sat at a folding table in the clubhouse, facing fourteen residents, most of whom had come to complain about a neighbor's boat. I spoke for my three minutes. I said my daughter has a medical condition, and her medication is not a narcotic, and the pool rules need a medical exception, and I'd be glad to paint it on the board for free.
Verlene thanked me for my comments. She said the board took the safety of all residents very seriously, which is a sentence I have since come to understand means nothing at all. She said the board would "note" the doctor's letter in our file. She said that any resident who required special accommodations could submit a written request through the management company, which would be reviewed at the next quarterly meeting, in October, after the pool closed for the season. Then she moved on to the boat.
The only board member who said anything to me afterward was the treasurer, a retired Sprint accountant named Wynette Dancy, sixty or so, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a cardigan she wore even in July because the clubhouse air conditioning was set, by Verlene's standing order, to sixty-eight. She caught me in the parking lot under the honey locusts.
"I abstained on the fine," she said. "For what that's worth."