Chapter 4

Then she said, "Who gave you permission to be back here?"I stepped forward and said pleasantly that this was my mother, that my name is Dorian Hale, and that I live on Kestrel Court."That doesn't make her a resident," Celeste said.I said we were checking a property boundary.Celeste laughed. It was a short, disbelieving laugh, the kind people use to tell you that you've embarrassed yourself. She pulled her sunglasses down at last and looked at me with something close to pity."Dorian," she said, "living next to association property doesn't mean you own it."I told her we were not making a claim about the association's property. I told her that some of the ground she was standing on was recorded to my mother, and that we were looking for the original corner monument. I said it in the flattest, most boring voice I own, because I have learned that facts sound like threats when you deliver them with heat.She stopped listening about six words in. That is the thing I keep returning to: she had already decided what kind of conversation this was. She turned to my mother, and her voice changed. And this is where it went from rudeness to something with a taste to it, because she began speaking to a 69-year-old woman the way a bad supervisor speaks to a temp."Ma'am, I need you to walk back up to the parking lot right now. This is a private community, and you are not permitted past this point."My mother did not move. She adjusted the strap of her purse on her shoulder, and she said quite kindly, "Are you certain this is association land?"And Celeste said the sentence that ended the possibility of a reasonable Saturday. She said, "I'm the president of this association. I think I know what we own."

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