I said, "System checks out. No leaks."
She did not respond. After a moment, she turned and walked back to her car.
I watched her drive out the same way I had watched her drive out on the October morning she arrived with her clipboard, her compliance notice, and her 14-day ultimatum. And then I looked down at the manifold, and then I looked across the lower field toward the tank, white and slightly domed in the gray November light, sitting in the same place my grandfather had set the original installation 62 years before.
Warren came and stood beside me. He looked at the tank for a moment and then looked at me. "Well," he said, "that's interesting."
"Routine maintenance," I said.
He nodded slowly. "Of course it was."
What followed was less dramatic than the hour that preceded it, and more durable.
Three days after the pressure test, I received a call from a board member named Thomas Carver, who introduced himself as the HOA's newly elected president (Diane Coulter had resigned her infrastructure compliance chair position the previous evening, effective immediately), and who asked, with the careful courtesy of a man navigating unfamiliar ground, whether I would be willing to meet with the board to discuss the infrastructure situation.