Chapter 2 : The first thing that happened was that Marcus, the pool desk clerk, came out of the clubhouse with the clipboard that carried the membership roster for the season. He was nineteen, skinny, still in his school polo from a summer internship
"I can look," he said to Ramona. "I mean — I can look at the roster. If you want."
"Roster won't show it," Ramona said. "Roster was set by the board. Board does the roster."
"Right," Marcus said, and didn't move.
Dale had walked away ten minutes earlier. Not far. He was standing at the far end of the clubhouse walkway, near the doors, on his phone. He'd been on the phone since 2:31. His face had gone from red to a kind of gray-red, and he was standing with his back to the deck in a way that was more exposed than if he'd stood facing it — a man on the phone with his back to a crowd he had spent fourteen years commanding.
Twice Ramona watched him cup the phone with his free hand, like he was trying to keep the conversation from floating over.
Delia had stopped filming at some point. Ramona wasn't sure when. But Delia was now standing directly in front of Ramona, maybe four feet away, holding her phone down at her side with the screen dark, and she had the expression of a woman who had just found out the pool she'd been swimming in was privately owned.
"Was that paper — is that real?" Delia asked.
"Yes."
"Like, recorded? At the county?"
"Filed in 2016," Ramona said. "Quitclaim. My mother signed it six months before she passed. Dale did the notary. The recorder's office stamped it the same week."
Delia's mouth moved like she was trying to say something and kept changing her mind. "But — okay, but your mother — "
"My mother owned the common parcel," Ramona said. "The pool sits on it. So does the walkway, and the clubhouse apron, and the visitor row where my car is parked right now." She looked at Delia without any particular heat. "That's why the fine ledger is interesting."
"Because of the parcel number."
"Because of the parcel number," Ramona agreed. "Three years of violations against a parcel number that wasn't mine. Twenty-two-C was my mother's old lot. The fine ledger Dale has been building for three years is against 22-C. Which is me. Which is the parcel he's standing on."
Delia was quiet for a second. Then she said, "He notarized it."
"He did."
"So he knew."
Ramona shook her head. "No. That's the part everybody's going to get wrong." She reached into her tote and pulled out the deed, but didn't unfold it — she just held it, folded, in her left hand, like a napkin. "He didn't read it. My mother asked him to sign and stamp, and he did. He was on his way to the lake with his grandkids. He said 'sure, Barbara' — my mother's name was Barbara — and he stamped the last page and signed it and went to the lake."
"You heard him say that?"
"I was sitting right there with the coffee."
Delia's face did something complicated. Ramona watched her decide not to be angry and decide not to be sorry and settle somewhere in the middle, on a third thing that Ramona recognized because she had felt it herself, more than once, walking through this subdivision: *I don't know what to do with this information.*
"I'm not gonna post it," Delia said.
Ramona didn't say anything.
"I mean — I already — I posted part of it. Like, the first part. But I can take it down."
"Delia, it's fine."
"It's not fine, though."
"It's fine," Ramona said again, and she meant it. "You filmed what happened. That's not the problem. The problem is what happened."
Delia looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, "Let me at least get you an ice pack. My house is two streets up. I've got a bag of frozen peas and a wrap in the freezer."
"Sit down," Ramona said, and nodded at the folding chair next to hers. "You can get me a peas later. Right now I want you to sit down and watch."
"Watch what?"
Ramona pointed behind Delia with her chin.
At the far end of the walkway, Dale had turned around. He had his phone in his hand and he was walking back toward the deck, slowly, with his chest out the way it had always been — but his hands were doing something with the phone they hadn't done before. He was holding it in front of him like a man checking a text he'd already read.
He stopped twenty feet away.
"Ramona," he called. His voice was different. He was still loud, but he was loud the way you're loud when you want a room to hear a thing you've decided to say. "I need to talk to you. Privately."
"No," Ramona said. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to. There were four neighbors still on the deck and one of them, Ramona noticed, was the woman with the sun hat, still barefoot, still next to her.
"Ramona — "
"Dale," Ramona said. "You called me a squatter in front of forty of my neighbors. Anything you have to say to me now, you can say in front of the eleven who are left."
Dale's jaw worked. He stepped forward six feet and stopped again, close enough now that Ramona could see the phone screen — a message thread, and above it, a name she couldn't read from the angle. He turned the phone face-down against his thigh.
"There's a board meeting tomorrow," he said.
"There's an emergency board meeting at five o'clock today," Ramona said. "Your board secretary called it. She called it at 2:22, while I was still sitting here with your handprint on my face."
Dale's mouth opened.
"Your board secretary," Ramona said, "is my neighbor. She watched the whole thing from her kitchen window. She has a very good view of the pool gate."
Dale stood there for a moment. He looked, Ramona thought, exactly like a man who had spent years telling himself a story and had just heard it contradicted by a piece of paper he had signed himself.
"Fine," he said. "Five o'clock. Clubhouse. Bring the deed."
"I was planning to."
Dale turned and walked away toward the parking lot, and Ramona sat on her folding chair with her hands folded over the tote and watched him go, and she did not smile.
But when Delia finally got up and walked to the visitor row and stood in front of the silver 2011 Corolla like she was looking at a historic landmark, Ramona let herself tilt her head back, just a little, and feel the sun on her face — the good side, the left side, the side he hadn't hit.
The sun was still the sun. The cicadas were still the cicadas.
The pool was still her mother's pool. Tomorrow at five, in front of the board, she was finally going to say so out loud.
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All 8 chapters
- 1One second the pool deck was a wall of noise — cicadas, a radio playing something with too much bass, kids screaming through the chain-link, the flat slap of wet feet on hot concrete — and the next second all of it went thin, like somebod
- 2The first thing that happened was that Marcus, the pool desk clerk, came out of the clubhouse with the clipboard that carried the membership roster for the season. He was nineteen, skinny, still in his school polo from a summer internship
- 3Ramona walked over at 4:45 in flip-flops and a clean gray t-shirt, with her tote on her shoulder and the deed in a gallon Ziploc bag because Delia had brought the peas and made her put a bag of them on her cheek, and the peas had left a w
- 4Dale's signature on the deed was not pretty. It slanted up to the right, the way signatures do when you're signing on the hood of a car or a counter you're not leaning on, and the "D" had a habit of losing its loop at the end. His "Brandt
- 5The earlier log was in the safe-deposit box that Dale Brandt kept at the Carthage Savings Bank on Main Street, box 441, and Ramona did not know that until Tuesday morning at 9:12 AM, when Sonya called her from the bank's parking lot.
- 6Ramona called at 8:30 Wednesday. Lane answered on the second ring.
- 7Ramona was on the second floor at 8:05 Thursday with the strip's legal description written on an index card, and she handed the card to the woman at the desk, and the woman typed it into the terminal, and looked at the screen, and looked
- 8"Yolanda says the box has been empty since Monday," Sonya said. "The log shows Dale was in there Monday at 9:07. Yolanda says she didn't see what he took out. She wasn't working the vault that day."
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