"Tuesday's fine," Glynis says. "Everett will have it right by Tuesday."
At two minutes and fifty seconds, Kenton gets in the truck and pulls out through the maintenance gate, and you can see his license plate for about a second and a half as the truck turns. At three minutes and twenty seconds, Glynis says something to Everett, kisses him on the cheek, the way you'd kiss a child going into school, and walks off toward the clubhouse, fanning herself with the folded paper. Everett stands there alone for a while. He looks down at the jugs. He looks at the pump house door. At three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, he unlocks it and goes inside, carrying two jugs, and the door swings shut behind him on its slow spring, and at four minutes and nine seconds I stopped recording, because I had gotten what I wanted, and because my coffee was getting warm, which in Arizona in July means it was getting hot.
I climbed down. I watched the video once on the patio, zooming in on the jugs and getting nothing but blur. I thought about sending it to Fern. I thought about sending it to the county. I thought about sending it to a lawyer who'd told me, back in February, that he'd take my fine dispute for a fifteen-hundred-dollar retainer, which was almost as much as the fine. In the end, I didn't send it to anyone. I put the phone in the pocket of my scrub pants, which I still had on because they're the most comfortable pants I own, and I went inside to argue with my son about the enchiladas.
Twenty minutes later, Nico was standing at the sliding glass door with his face screwed up.
"Mom," he said. "Do you smell that?"
I didn't, at first. The house was closed up tight against the heat and the air conditioner was roaring. Then he slid the door open a few inches and I did.
There's a smell chlorine has when it's in the water, the smell of a hotel pool, which is mostly not chlorine at all but chloramines, chlorine that's already bonded to sweat and sunscreen and everything else people bring with them. And then there's the smell of chlorine itself, free, as a gas. It's sharper. It's greener, if a smell can be a color. It goes into the back of your nose and pinches, and your eyes start watering before you've even decided whether you're smelling anything at all. I had smelled it once before, in a hospital supply room, when a new housekeeper mixed a bleach cleaner with an acid descaler in a mop bucket, and three people ended up in my department on oxygen.
"Close the door," I said. "Nico. Close it. Get your inhaler, go to your room, shut your door, and put a towel along the bottom."
"Why—"
"Now, please."
He went. He's a good kid. He has heard that voice before.