"Well," she said, and put her glasses back on, and picked the pen back up. "I'm sure they'll find it." She turned to the board. "The chair will entertain a motion to table Item 4 until the October meeting, pending the outcome of Mr. Osgood's repair."
Roarke moved. Prue seconded. It passed without discussion. I remember feeling like I'd won something, and being a little surprised at how easy it had been, and walking home along the boulevard in the dark with the sprinklers on the Gateway Green ticking away behind the fence, chk-chk-chk-chk, throwing their silver arcs across the bluegrass in the light from the monument sign, and thinking, without thinking about it very hard, that it was a Thursday, and Thursday wasn't a watering day for anybody.
So that was where things stood at seven-thirty on Saturday morning, with Georgine kneeling at my meter pit with a key in her hands, and me standing on my own gravel in gym shorts.
My wife, Esme, had left at twenty to seven in the minivan with our nine-year-old, Rafe, for a two-day swim meet in Grand Junction, four and a half hours over the mountains. My truck was in the garage with the door down, where it always is, because the wind out here sandblasts the paint. Pia's bedroom faces the back. From the street, at a quarter to seven on a Saturday in August, our house would have looked exactly like a house that had just been emptied out for the weekend. I didn't put that together until later. At that moment I only knew that Georgine Vandeventer had expected me not to be there, and that I was.
"Turn it back on," I said.
She got up, then, using the meter key like a cane, and dusted off the knees of her capris. She was a head shorter than me and she managed to make that look like my fault.
"Mr. Osgood, I understand you're upset. I am truly sorry about the inconvenience. But you have a significant leak on your service line, as you told the entire board on Thursday, and that leak has been saturating the subgrade of the Gateway Green." She pointed with the key at the trench behind her, on the other side of our fence. "The monument sign sits on a spread footing that is twenty feet from your line. If the soil under it washes out, that sign comes down, and that is a forty-thousand-dollar common element and a liability for every owner in this community. Article Nine of the Declaration grants the association an easement and a right of entry to abate any condition that threatens the common area. That's what we're doing. Efrain is going to expose the break and put a repair coupling on it, at no cost to you, I might add, and you'll have water back in under an hour."