I asked him about the lockbox. He showed me. It was a black metal box mounted by the door with a slot and a padlock, and he told me that Marcella had the only key. "She checks it every day," he said. "She is very conscientious."
"Then she'd have found my ramp application."
Fitzgerald looked at the notice in my hand, and something in his face went careful. "You submitted one."
"On the twentieth. I have a copy."
"Ah." He was quiet for a moment. "I would keep that copy somewhere safe, Mrs. Quarterman. And I would send another by certified mail to the management company in Raleigh. The address is on page two of the covenants. They are slow, but they are not Marcella."
"Is this a pattern?"
He looked out at the pond, at the fountain making its perfect arc. "Marcella has been president for six years," he said. "She works very hard. She cares very much about this neighborhood. She cares about it the way some people care about a lawn: she would like everything that doesn't belong in it to be pulled up by the root." He tapped the clipboard against his leg. "I'm the treasurer. I count money. I am not a brave man. I'm sorry. Welcome to Bittern Ridge."
He went to test the pool. I went home by the long way, along Egret Drive and around the back of the pond, and that was how I met Pa Houa Lor.
She was on Gannet Court, in the yard of a small split-level with a carport, and her front yard was not a lawn. It was a garden. Not a disorderly one: beds edged in old bricks, bamboo trellises tied with strips of cloth, long beans hanging in green ropes, bitter melon, lemongrass in fat clumps, mustard greens, Thai chilies, a row of marigolds along the sidewalk that I suspected were there for the HOA's benefit. She was about four foot ten and somewhere past seventy-five, in a wide straw hat and rubber boots, and she was cutting greens into a plastic dish tub.
Tou, Jerome's friend, came out of the carport when he saw me. "Ms. Quarterman. Hey. This is my grandma."