Chapter 2

My land does not belong to the homeowners association. It never has. Silvercrest was platted eight years after my parcel was deeded, and when the developer laid out the golf course, he had a problem: the reclaimed water main from the district ran along the far edge of Dolores Kingman's property, and the pressure at that point was nowhere near enough to push water uphill through a mile of irrigation loop.So, the developer did the cheap thing instead of the smart thing. He negotiated with Dolores, poured a concrete pad on her land, and installed a booster station there. In exchange, he recorded an easement in the county files that gave his golf course the right to receive water through that station forever.Vanessa took the president's chair two years ago on a platform she liked to call "restoring the standard," which in practice meant repainting the guardhouse, replacing the entry monument with a taller entry monument, and sending violation letters to anyone whose garage door faded. I watched all of it from the wrong side of the fence with a certain amount of amusement, because none of it touched me.Then somebody on the 11th tee box mentioned that a sliver of my pump house roof was visible from the cart path if you look northeast past the cottonwoods, and Vanessa found her cause.She never once called it a water system. In her mouth, it was always "the structure," "the eyesore," "the metal thing," as though it were a broken washing machine somebody had abandoned in a field.I offered a solution the first week she raised it, and I offered it in good faith because I had no interest in a war with 180 households. I told her I would plant a screening row of live oaks and Arizona cypress along the north edge of the pad, and that I would build a cedar and stone architectural screen around the housing at my own expense if she would put the design approval in writing. That would have cost somewhere near $9,000, and it would have been finished in 11 days.Vanessa did not want a compromise, and I understood that faster than she thought I did, because compromise gives the other person standing. She wanted the pad bare. She wanted to be able to stand at that tee box in front of the finance committee and say she had made something disappear.Every letter after that got shorter and colder, and every one of them arrived certified, which told me she was already building a file.

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