"Fidel, I didn't need to call it in. It's an emergency abatement. The association has a right of entry under—"
"The association doesn't have a right to operate a district curb stop," he said. He said it gently, but he said it. "Nobody does. Not the association, not the homeowner, not the plumber, not the fire department unless there's a fire. Only us. You know that." He stood up. His knees cracked. "You taught me that. You said it to me my first week, in the yard behind the shop, holding a key just like that one. You said, Fidel, the meter belongs to the district, and the curb stop belongs to the district, and if you turn somebody's water off, you tag it and you log it and you knock on the door, every single time, because there might be a baby in the bath. That's what you said. There might be a baby in the bath."
Georgine didn't answer. Behind me I felt Pia shift her weight.
"Where's the leak?" Fidel asked.
"In the trench," Georgine said, after a moment. "Efrain's got it exposed. It's a cracked fitting. He'll have a coupling on it in ten minutes. Fidel, honestly, it's nothing. I was trying to save the man a bill."
Fidel looked at her for a long second. Then he walked over to the fence. Our side fence along the Green was a three-rail split cedar with wire mesh, and he stepped over it like it wasn't there and walked to the edge of the trench and looked down. Efrain backed up against the far wall of the hole with the spade held in front of him.
The trench was maybe four feet deep and six feet long. At the bottom of it, I could see our service line, a black one-inch polyethylene pipe running from the direction of the meter toward my house, dusty and intact. There was no wet soil around it. There was no hiss. There was no crack. What there was, clamped around the black pipe with two stainless bolts, was a brass saddle fitting the size of a fist, green with age, and coming off the top of the saddle, at a right angle, was a second, smaller pipe, three-quarter-inch blue poly, that ran across the bottom of the trench and disappeared into the wall of dirt on the side toward the Gateway Green.