The first person to welcome me to Bittern Ridge did it with her middle finger, and she held it up long enough that I had time to notice her manicure.
It was a Saturday in late August, a little after nine at night, and the heat in Fernhill, North Carolina, had not gotten the message that the sun was down. I was standing in my new driveway in my late husband's flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, a pair of paint-spattered jeans, and a Hampton University ball cap that had been through two washing machines and one hurricane. My nephew Jerome and two of his friends from the community college were carrying my father's recliner up the ramp of a rented box truck backward, because they had loaded it last and needed it first, and I was holding a flashlight on the ramp so nobody broke an ankle.
Behind the box truck sat my own truck, a 1996 Ford F-250, green once, mostly primer now, with a dent in the tailgate shaped exactly like a fence post I'd backed into in 2009. I loved that truck the way you love a dog that bites the mailman. My husband Lorenzo had called it the Diplomat, because it never started an argument but it never lost one either.
The woman came up the sidewalk out of the dark at a fast walk, the kind of walk people take for their health and use for surveillance. She was in her early sixties, lean, in white athletic capris and a lavender visor, with a phone in one hand and a small flashlight clipped to her waistband. She stopped at the property line as precisely as if somebody had painted it on the concrete.
"Excuse me," she said. "Who's in charge here?"
I lowered the flashlight so it wasn't in her eyes. "Evening. I suppose I am."
She looked at me, then at the truck, then at Jerome, who was six foot four and wearing a tank top that said FERNHILL TECH WRESTLING, then at the other two boys, then back at me. I watched her do the math. I have watched people do that math my entire life. It's quick, and it's never as private as they think.
"Is the owner here?" she said.
"I'm the owner."