"Why did it stop?"
That was the question, and as soon as she asked it I realized I didn't know the answer, and that I had been too busy to wonder. A water main break, I thought first. Maybe the district was working on the line. But there'd been no notice, and there's always a notice, a yellow door hanger two days ahead, and the district in Cottonwood Bluffs was the kind of outfit that sent you a text if they were going to flush a hydrant three streets away.
I got up and went to the front window in the living room.
Our house sits on the corner of Chokecherry Court and Piñon Draw Boulevard, the last lot before the subdivision entrance, which is why we got it for what we could afford and why nobody else had wanted it for almost two years. You can see the main road from the front porch, and you can hear it, and in the spring the wind comes off the Palmer Divide and blows every piece of trash in the county against our side fence. Behind the house and along the east side, where the fence meets the boulevard, there's a wedge of common area that the homeowners association calls the Gateway Green. It's a triangle of thick, absurdly bright Kentucky bluegrass about the size of two tennis courts, with the stone monument sign that says PIÑON DRAW in brushed bronze letters, and a bench, and a young red maple, maybe fifteen feet tall, that was the only tree on the whole north end of the development that wasn't a juniper or a scrub oak.
Our water meter sits at the front corner of our lot, right where our side fence meets the sidewalk, a few feet from the edge of the Green. It's in a round concrete pit, the kind they use out here because of the frost line, with a heavy cast-iron lid stamped CBWSD and a small hole in the middle where the reading antenna pokes through.
The lid was off. It was lying upside down on our gravel, like a turtle on its back.
Kneeling beside the open pit, in a wide-brimmed straw sun hat and a pair of pressed khaki capris and gardening gloves the color of a mint, with a five-foot steel T-handle meter key held upright in both hands like a shepherd's crook, was Georgine Vandeventer, the president of the Piñon Draw Homeowners Association.