I've seen the phrase in a hundred of those online stories since then, and I always thought it was an exaggeration, a thing people say. It isn't. She didn't move. She didn't argue, she didn't cite an article, she didn't ask for a lawyer or say she was the president of anything. She just stood there with her gloved hands at her sides, and her mouth slightly open, and her eyes fixed on the officer's face as if Kasprzak had said something in a language she had studied once, long ago, and could almost remember. Three seconds. Four. A car went by on the boulevard. A sprinkler head somewhere out on the Green, which had no business being on, ticked once and stopped.
"Ma'am," Kasprzak said, more gently. "Turn around, please."
"My gloves," Georgine said. It came out as barely more than a whisper. "May I take off my gloves?"
Kasprzak hesitated, then nodded. Georgine pulled off one mint-green gardening glove and then the other, finger by finger, the way you'd take off good gloves at a funeral, and folded them together, and looked around for somewhere to put them. Nobody moved. Finally Fidel stepped forward and held out his hand, and she gave them to him, and he stood holding them while she turned around and Kasprzak put the cuffs on her, and the sound the cuffs made, that ratcheting click, was louder than anything else that had happened that morning, louder than the thunk in my walls, louder than my daughter's scream.
"Fidel," Georgine said, with her back to all of us, "Tuesday is the Green's day. Will you—" and then she stopped, because she knew, I think, before she finished, what he would have to say, and she didn't want to make him say it.
He said it anyway. "I can't, Georgie. Nobody can touch that system now. It's evidence."
She nodded, once, and let Kasprzak walk her to the cruiser. Halfway there she lost one of her slip-on sneakers on the edge of the sidewalk, and Kasprzak stopped and waited while she worked her foot back into it, and the whole street waited with her, Octave in his bathrobe and Efrain in his trench and Fidel holding her gloves, and me, and my daughter, with her towel and her orange hair and her burned neck, watching the president of the Piñon Draw Homeowners Association get folded into the back seat of a police car with one hand on her head, at five minutes to eight on a Saturday morning, in front of the Gateway Green.