"Why? She did it."
"She did," I said. "And she should answer for it. But the people laughing don't know about Everett. They don't know she thought she was protecting him. They think it's a funny story about a mean lady and a phone." I turned his phone face down on the table, gently. "It's not a funny story. It's a story about a man who almost died because somebody put the wrong word on a jug, and about everybody who decided not to look closely enough to notice. Including the people on the board. Including the inspector. Including me, for a while, when I gave up."
He thought about that. Then he said, "You didn't give up, though. You were standing on the stool."
"I was drinking coffee on the stool," I said. "That's different."
"Still on the stool," said my son, and took the last enchilada.
The emergency meeting of the Saguaro Bend Homeowners Association was held on the twentieth of August in the clubhouse, with the air conditioner turned all the way down and every folding chair the association owned set out in rows, plus a dozen camp chairs people had brought from home. I counted a hundred and forty people. At the annual meeting, the year before, there had been forty.
There was no board left to run it. Glynis had resigned by letter the day she was charged. Kenton had resigned through his attorney. Lowell Darrow resigned at the beginning of the meeting, in a short statement in which he said that he "deeply regretted any role" he might have played and that he "had always relied in good faith on the representations of the president and treasurer," and then he sat down in the front row and looked at his shoes while the room was quiet in a way that was worse than booing. The fourth board member, a soft-spoken woman named Odalys Restrepo who'd been on the board for only six months and who had voted with the majority on the pool contract because, she said, "it was my second meeting and I didn't know I was allowed to say no," stayed to run the meeting until an interim board could be appointed, and did it well, and apologized four separate times.
The association's insurance company had sent a lawyer, a young man in a suit far too heavy for August, who explained in a careful voice that the association would likely be named in several civil actions, that the pool would remain closed until it had been fully inspected and recommissioned under a contract with a licensed and bonded service company, and that dues would be going up. Someone asked by how much. He told them. There was a sound in the room like air going out of a tire.
Then Fern stood up.
She'd brought the beaded chain and the reading glasses, and a single sheet of paper, and she didn't look at the paper once.