"Thank you for your concern," she wrote. "The pool is maintained to all county standards by a certified pool operator and logs are available for inspection. Pool chemicals are safe when properly balanced. Asthma, as I'm sure you know professionally, can be triggered by many things including heat, exercise, and pollen. We'd ask that residents with medical conditions take personal responsibility for their own health when using shared amenities."
The certified pool operator, I found out later, was her husband.
I had met Everett Hollister maybe a dozen times. He was seventy-one, a big, soft-spoken man with forearms like ham hocks and a white mustache he trimmed with obvious pride. He had owned a pool service company in Mesa for thirty-four years, Everett's Crystal Pools, with a logo of a cartoon dolphin in sunglasses that was still painted, faded to pink, on the side of the old Ford Ranger he drove around the neighborhood. People liked him. He waved at everyone. He knew the names of every dog. When the professional company the HOA had used for a decade raised its price, it was Glynis, as president of the board, who moved to cancel the contract and "bring maintenance in-house," which meant Everett, with what she called "a modest volunteer stipend," and Kenton Brandvold, the board treasurer, who owned a janitorial supply business out by the airport, providing the chemicals "at cost."
The motion passed four to one. The minutes said it would save the association thirty-one thousand dollars a year. Dues went down eleven dollars a month. People cheered at the annual meeting. I was working that night, so I missed the cheering, but Fern Abiodun, who lives two doors down from me, told me about it.
"They applauded," Fern said, "like she had personally cured the heat."
Fern is seventy-eight. She taught high school chemistry in Phoenix for thirty-six years, and she keeps her reading glasses on a beaded chain her granddaughter made her, and she has the kind of voice that makes grown men put their phones away without knowing why. She had been the one vote against.
"I asked a simple question," she told me. "I asked where Mr. Brandvold's chemicals come from and who certifies them. He said, 'Same place everybody's do, ma'am.' That is not an answer. That is a shrug wearing a tie."
After the June incident, I asked for the pool logs. I was told the request had to be made in writing, so I made it in writing. I was told the board would consider it at the next meeting, so I went to the next meeting. Glynis stood at the front of the clubhouse in a sleeveless navy dress and a silver necklace with a tiny pendant shaped like a house, and she read my request out loud in a voice so pleasant you'd have thought she was announcing the winner of a bake sale.
"Ms. Kallas," she said, "would like to inspect the volunteer logs kept by my husband, who has given this community hundreds of hours of his time free of charge, because her son had an asthma attack." She looked up at the forty or so people in the folding chairs. "I want to be very careful how I say this. We all feel for a child who struggles. But I won't have Everett's integrity questioned because someone needs a place to put her worry."
Someone in the back said, "Amen."
I stood up. I said that I wasn't questioning anybody's integrity. I said that chlorine and acid are both used to maintain pools and both are dangerous if they're mishandled, that a level high enough to burn a child's eyes was not a matter of worry but of measurement, and that if the logs were fine, then looking at them would cost nothing.