She was quiet for a second, flipping through her own mail without looking at it. "I understand there was an incident this morning."
"There was. You called the police on my father."
"I called the police on a person I didn't recognize standing in front of a property with a history." She said it fast, the way you say something you've rehearsed. "I have no way of knowing who lives in your house. You didn't introduce your household to the board. There's a form."
"He's eighty-one. He was cold and lost and he thought he was late for work."
Something flickered across her face. I want to be fair about this, too: it was not nothing. For half a second she looked like a woman who'd been told something she didn't want to know and was trying to decide whether to know it.
"I'm sorry he was frightened," she said. "But you don't understand what this neighborhood was like. Before. That house." She pointed with her chin at mine. "Do you know what went on in that house? The yard was knee-high. There were cars on blocks. There was a man living in the garage who wasn't on any lease. There were people coming and going all hours. My husband and I bought here in 1994. We put everything we had into this house. Everything. When Simon got sick—" She stopped. "Property values are not an abstraction, Mrs. Quarterman. They're people's retirements. They're people's medical bills. Somebody has to care. I'm the one who cares."
"Who was the man living in the garage?"
She blinked. "I have no idea. That was the point."
"Was it Mr. Pettiford's grandson?"
She didn't answer that. She closed her mailbox. "The ramp needs to come down," she said. "I'm sorry. Rules are only fair if they apply to everyone."