Chapter 8 : The final board meeting was on a Thursday, six weeks after the first one. Harriet called it to order at 7:00 p.m. and the gavel came down at 7:01.
Story: The HOA President Fined Me $650 for a Pool Gate — Then the Log Showed Her Own Fob at 2 A.M.
The room was full again. Everybody came. The pickleball men. The Ruiz family. The Friedmans. Karen and Dennis Hall. Marcus Bell, sitting at the side table with his laptop open. The woman from Lot 32 who had told me she had paid a three-hundred-dollar fine in November. The people from Lot 44, who had installed their doorbell camera two years ago after their own note, and who had, at last, produced their own video for the county. Nine households on the reassessment list. Thirteen pending. Two checks going out of state.
The agenda was six items and it took four hours.
The first item was the reassessment. Harriet read the ledger into the minutes, line by line, which took ninety minutes. Nine paid fines were refunded with interest — a small amount, seventy-four dollars total on my fine, which had been vacated but never refunded until the corporate office processed it. Seven pending fines were vacated. Two warnings were upgraded to formal violation notices and mailed to the property owner at Lot 6, which the board cannot actually enforce because it is the same account the board has been reviewing, and which Pat's attorney had, per the county's file, already placed under review. One fine to a family that had moved out of state in February had a forwarding address in the ledger because I had put it there, and their check was scheduled for the following Monday.
The second item was the county tag on the cabana. The tag had been open for two hundred and forty-one days by the Thursday meeting. The county had set a compliance hearing for the first Tuesday of September. Pat had, per the county, engaged an attorney in a neighboring town and had filed a request for an extension. The request was granted. The tag remained open.
The third item was the note. The county had, by the Thursday meeting, charged Pat Vance with a misdemeanor count of tampering with a witness in a pending civil matter and a misdemeanor count of criminal mischief. The district attorney's office had set a plea hearing in October. I do not know what she said to the deputies. I have not read the file. I have not asked. I will not ask.
The fourth item was the resignation. Pat Vance had not resigned. The board, per its bylaws, had no authority to remove her. The only way to remove her before the end of her term was a recall vote of the entire membership at the annual meeting in January, and a recall vote required fifty-one percent of the lots present, and the board could not call one. Only the members could call one. So the fourth item on the agenda was a motion by Roberta Conley to open a recall petition at the annual meeting in January, seconded by Harriet Poole, passed unanimously by the four seated members.
The fifth item was Harriet Poole's swearing-in as interim president, which happened at 8:40 p.m. with a legal-scale oath administered by Roberta Conley from a printed page from the bylaws.
The sixth item was a motion by the interim president to table the pool card reader and gate reader logs to the management company's regional office until the recall vote. Passed unanimously.
Then Harriet closed the meeting and stood up and looked at the empty chair at the end of the table — Pat's chair, which had not been sat in since the night Pat had walked out — and said, "I'm leaving the chair empty for the rest of the term. It will be filled at the annual meeting. I want the minutes to reflect that the board chose not to use it."
The room did not applaud. That's not what I want you to think. The room was quiet. What I want you to think is that the room stayed. People did not leave. They sat in their vinyl chairs and drank their coffee from the coffee urn that had, for the first time in three weeks, been refilled, and they talked to each other about small things. About the water bill. About the raccoon in the pickleball man's trash can. About labor day plans.
I was the last person to leave. I stood at the end of the table for a minute, next to the empty chair, and I looked at the gavel where it had stayed through seven meetings. I did not touch it. I did not want to.
Marcus closed his laptop and stood up and waited for me by the side door.
"You want the last file?" he said.
"What last file?"
"The pool light log for September. The first month. Before the first violation. There's one entry on Sept ninth at 11:48 p.m., and the switch was thrown for four hours."
"Whose?"
"Lot Six," he said.
We stood in the side doorway for a minute. Outside, the pool fence was lit by the clubhouse security light and I could see the two latches — the one with the reader, and the old one at the end that had never once, in eleven years, been shut all the way. Somebody had left a sticker on the reader box. Not a violation sticker. A county tag. It was taped to the reader box, black and white, a numbered docket for the cabana permit. Somebody must have walked down there on the way out of the meeting and stuck it on. I will never know who.
"That was a good night," Marcus said.
"It was a long night."
"Long nights count."
We walked out to the parking lot together. He got in his car and I got in mine. And I sat for a moment with the key in the ignition and my hands on the wheel and my mother's voice in my head, telling me to eat something.
Then I drove home. I did not pass Pat's house. There is a way to get home without passing her house, and I have been taking it for six weeks, and every time I do I notice that I am noticing, and I think at some point I will stop noticing. Not yet.
I want to tell you three small things before I get up from this table.
The first is that Harriet Poole wrote me a letter. A real letter, on lined paper, in a card. It arrived last Tuesday. It said, in full: "You were right to hold the receipt. It is what I should have done four years ago. Yours, Harriet."
The second is that Marcus Bell quit his job. He gave notice two weeks after the meeting, and he took a position at a management company two towns over that runs its board meetings on a published agenda and a published ledger and a published log. He did not quit because of me. He quit because the company he was working for did what companies do. He is doing fine. I saw him at the grocery store on Saturday. He was buying two bunches of celery, because he had not yet been in the new town long enough to know that the one on the corner sells it cheaper.
The third is that I have kept the violation sticker. The one from April 12. The one that started everything. It is in the top drawer of my desk, in the file with the pink hospital visitor band and the parking receipt from Ohio. I do not know why I kept it, exactly. I think it is because it is the last document anyone in this neighborhood ever tried to write about me that was not true, and I want to remember what that felt like, on the night it happened, when I was sitting at a folding table under the fluorescent lights and a woman in a cream blazer was smiling.
The gavel is still on the table. The chair is still empty. The pool gate has two latches, and the old one will never shut all the way, and somebody, at last, walked down there and stuck a county tag on the reader box.
I got up from the kitchen table and turned off the light.
Then I went to bed and I slept eight hours.
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All 8 chapters
- 1"—and I have the photos right here, Dana. Right here in this folder. So before you tell this board you're the victim, I want you to look at what your license plate was doing at eleven forty-five on the night of April twelfth."
- 2He talked for eight minutes.
- 3The folder was nine files. I want to tell you what was in it, because if the rest of this story is going to make sense to you, you have to understand what I was holding by Sunday morning.
- 4The woman on the phone was named Tanisha McElroy and she was the permit clerk for the county office, and she was not in the mood for a long conversation.
- 5Deirdre Anson's office was in Phoenix and she was brisk in a way that I respected immediately because it was so unlike the clubhouse.
- 6I have to tell you what happened on Tuesday night, and I have to tell you why I made a decision that has cost me more than anything else in this.
- 7On Wednesday morning at 2:11 a.m. my phone rang.
- 8The final board meeting was on a Thursday, six weeks after the first one. Harriet called it to order at 7:00 p.m. and the gavel came down at 7:01.
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