That stung, because by then I had a much bigger problem than a hundred and fifty dollars, and the bigger problem was the water bill.
Our April bill was two hundred and twelve dollars. For a family of four in a three-bedroom house in April, before the swamp cooler, before anyone had watered anything, that was high but not crazy; I chalked it up to the move, the laundry, the long showers. May was three hundred and eighty-eight. June, with the drought surcharge tiers kicking in, was six hundred and eleven dollars, and it came with a separate letter, printed on pale orange paper, headed CONTINUOUS CONSUMPTION NOTICE. It said that our smart meter had recorded continuous water flow, without interruption, for more than seven consecutive days, which may indicate a leak on the customer side of the meter. It reminded me, politely, that the district owns and maintains the meter, the meter pit, and the curb stop valve, and that the property owner is responsible for the service line from the outlet of the meter to the house, and for every drop that goes through it. It enclosed a graph. The graph was a flat line with a row of narrow spikes along the top of it, like a picket fence, one spike every night between two and three in the morning, which I looked at and didn't think about. Underneath the spikes, day and night, weekdays and weekends, at four in the morning and four in the afternoon, our house was using a little under a gallon a minute. Fourteen hundred gallons a day. More than forty thousand gallons a month, going somewhere.
I did the test the letter told me to do. I went down to the basement and closed the main shutoff valve where the service line came through the foundation wall, so that no water could get into the house at all. Then I went out to the corner of the yard, pried up the cast-iron lid on the meter pit with a screwdriver, wiped the condensation off the glass face of the meter, and watched the little red triangle in the middle of the dial, which the letter called the low-flow indicator. With every valve in my house closed, it was still turning. Slowly, steadily, like the second hand on a cheap watch.
Which meant the water was leaving the line somewhere between the meter and my basement wall. Somewhere under sixty feet of front yard.
I called a plumber, a young guy named Teofil who came out with a ground microphone that looked like a metal detector and a pair of big padded headphones. He walked the line from the meter to the house twice. He frowned. He said the soil out here was so dry and so full of rock that sound didn't carry right, and the line was poly, which is quiet, and he couldn't pin it. He could hear water moving, he said, but he couldn't hear it hissing the way a leak hisses. He said I could start digging, or I could call the district, which had better equipment, and which would sometimes, during a drought, send a crew out to do a courtesy leak survey for a customer with a continuous consumption flag, because every gallon I lost was a gallon the whole town lost. I called the district. A pleasant woman in Customer Service looked up my account, said oh, wow, yeah, and booked a crew with an acoustic correlator for Monday morning, August twelfth, at eight o'clock. She said they'd put sensors on the meter and on the hose bib at the house and listen to the line from both ends and find it within a foot. She said not to worry. She said this happened all the time with these older developments, the poly lines got brittle and cracked at the fittings.
That was on a Tuesday. On Thursday night, August eighth, the Piñon Draw Homeowners Association held its quarterly open board meeting in the clubhouse by the pool, and I went, because my fines were on the agenda, under Old Business, Item 4: Enforcement — 1 Chokecherry Ct.
The clubhouse was a low stucco building that smelled of chlorine and carpet glue. There were about twenty folding chairs set up in rows and maybe fourteen people in them. The board sat at a long table at the front, with a pitcher of ice water and a laptop and a little American flag on a stand. Georgine sat in the middle with her reading glasses on and a gavel she didn't use. To her left was the treasurer, Prue Kestler, a soft-spoken woman in her fifties who did the books for a dental practice and who looked, the whole meeting, like she'd rather be anywhere else. To Georgine's right was a man named Roarke who sold commercial insurance and who mostly looked at his phone.