Chapter 6 : By nine-forty she was outside on the brick path between the clubhouse and the parking lot, standing under the shade of the porte-cochère with Dee beside her and both of them not saying anything.
Then Dee said, "You want to stay for lunch?"
"No."
"Yeah."
They walked to the cars. Mara put her key in the door.
"Mara," Dee said. "You want to know what I think?"
"Sure."
"I think it went as well as it could go," Dee said, "and I think that's the worst possible way for it to have gone."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, they're going to suspend him for a month, review the last two years of voids, find something or find nothing, and then at the end of it he's going to have the same hand he had before he did anything wrong. Somebody in the membership office is going to be the one who retyped the form, and it's going to be a low-level clerk who 'made a mistake,' and Mr. Hollis is going to be back on the board by September." Dee opened her car door. "And you'll have the seat. And the card. And that's the part that matters, because the seat was Danny's, and now it's yours. But don't sit around waiting for the club to hand you a moral victory. That's not the kind of thing they hand out."
Mara stood in the parking lot.
"Okay," she said.
"Also," Dee said, "your face is still bruise-free, which is going to be a problem."
"What?"
"You're going to want a bruise for the county complaint. You don't have one. Wait two days, take a picture every morning, do the whole thing. And before you file anything, get a lawyer. Real one. Not your cousin Steve."
"Okay."
"Okay," Dee said, and got in her car, and drove out.
Mara sat in her car and turned on the engine and did not drive.
She sat there for ten minutes with the AC on. Then she took out her phone and opened her contacts and called her father.
It rang four times.
"Dad."
"Mara."
"Are you sitting down?"
A pause. "I'm on the porch."
"Okay. Listen." She told him. The form. The counter-approval. Mr. Ashby. The vote. The suspension. The refund. She told it in chronological order, in order, fact by fact, because she knew the only way to get him to hear it was to not give him any room to blur it.
When she finished, there was a very long silence on the phone.
Her father had, as a shop teacher, once made a bench that stood in the school woodshop for thirty years, and he had a way of listening that felt like someone running a square over a board, checking for the corner where the description didn't match the wood.
"The money was your money," he said.
"Two quarters."
"He applied it to his own dues."
"Yes."
"And the whole time he was telling us the club had taken the seat away from you."
"Yes."
"Mara," her father said. His voice did a thing she had never heard it do before, which she would describe later, when she tried, as a truck downshifting on a hill. "Mara, he hit you."
"Yes."
"In front of the whole grill room."
"In front of two hundred people at Sunday lunch."
Her father did not say anything. She could hear the porch swing creak. Then creak again, and stop.
"I want to tell you something," her father said, finally. "Your mother, when she was alive — after we buried Daniel — she said to me, before she got sick, she said, do not let Hollis be the one who keeps the family book. She said it once, at the funeral, on the way home. I didn't know what she meant. I told her Hollis was the only one of us who ever remembered anybody's birthday. She said, that's not the book I mean." He was quiet for a while. "I didn't know what she meant," he said again.
"Okay."
"Fire the lawyer if you have to," he said. "But don't not call one."
"Okay."
"And Mara — don't press charges because you're angry. Press them because they're the ones you want to press. I'm not going to tell you not to. But if you don't, I'm going to want to know why."
"Okay."
There was a pause.
"Do you want me to come over?" her father said.
She thought about it.
"No," she said. "But thank you."
===
The rest of Monday happened. She went in to the clinic at eleven, apologized to Dr. Hsu for missing the morning, worked the afternoon shift, held a cat that didn't like being held, cleaned a surgical suite, updated six charts. Around 5:30, a woman came in with a basset hound named Marlow who'd been vomiting since Saturday. Mara ran the panel, gave the fluids, set the IV. Dr. Hsu told her to take five.
She sat in the break room with a bad cup of coffee from the machine and looked at her phone.
There were three missed calls from a number she didn't recognize, and one text from a number she did. Serena Downing.
*Ms. Ellison, the controller refunded the credit this morning. Your seat status is active in the system. Also — the retype question: the membership office's shared drive has a version history going back three years. I have access to it as a membership services clerk. Renata asked me to take screenshots of everything on that form before the IT person comes in tomorrow. I'm sending you one thing now. It's the file history. Look at the user ID on the retyped version.*
She opened the attachment.
It was a screenshot of the file-history panel for a Word document titled VOID_TRANSFER_FORM_ELLISON_DANIEL.
The file had been created eleven weeks ago by SERENA.DOWNING.
It had been edited Friday afternoon at 4:31 pm by a user whose ID read:
*R.ELLISO.*
Mara stared at it.
She typed back: *Can you take a screenshot of the user directory for that ID?*
The reply came in under a minute.
*It's not you, if that's what you're thinking.*
Then, a second message:
*I've been at this club two years. I've never seen that ID before. There's no R. Ellison at Willow Bend. I looked.*
Mara put down her coffee.
There was no R. Ellison at Willow Bend.
But there was an R. Ellison who used to be at Willow Bend. There was an R. Ellison whose name was in the front of every piece of Willow Bend correspondence from the eighties and nineties, in the plaques, on the letterhead, on the anniversary book. There was an R. Ellison who had been the very first Ellison to have a seat on the membership board twenty-two years ago, and whose name was in the founding row of the plaque in the lounge doorway, in brass, worn down from a hundred years of members' fingers pointing at it when they wanted to say, *that's the family.*
Robert Ellison Senior.
Her father.
===
Advertisement
All 8 chapters
- 1The palm landed before the words did.
- 2The parking lot at Willow Bend was laid out like everything else about the club — deliberately. There was the members' row, shaded, close to the door, with brass plaques for the old families. There was the guests' row, in the sun. And the
- 3Serena Downing's email arrived at 4:12. Mara opened it at the red light at the corner of Route 12 and Sunset Boulevard and had to pull into the church parking lot on the far side to actually read it, because there was an attachment, and t
- 4She called Dee.
- 5There was a second signature. There was a president who had known it for eleven weeks. There was a form in the board copy with a field retyped and a form in the membership office with the field intact. There was a chit in the plastic bin
- 6By nine-forty she was outside on the brick path between the clubhouse and the parking lot, standing under the shade of the porte-cochère with Dee beside her and both of them not saying anything.
- 7She did not call her father from the break room. She finished her shift. She drove home. She fed the cat that wasn't really hers — the one that had adopted the duplex — and she sat at her kitchen table with her laptop open and the screens
- 8Tuesday morning at eight forty, Mara pulled into the Willow Bend members' row parking lot and parked in the second spot from the door.
You may also like
The HOA President Swiped My Pool Badge and Called Me a Squatter — Then I Held Up the Deed He Notarized Himself
Dale Brandt ripped my pool badge out of my hand in front of forty neighbors and told me squatters don't get to swim. My…
The Vice Principal Tore Up My Transfer Slip at the Pep Rally — Then the Attendance Clerk Walked In With His Own Initials
Coleman Pruitt tore my transfer slip in half at the pep rally, held the pieces above my head, and told eleven hundred people I…
The HOA President Fined Me $650 for a Pool Gate I Never Touched — Then I Held Up the Pink Carbon Copy With Her Own Initials on It
"You left the pool gate unlatched again," Patricia Vance said, sliding the $650 violation sticker across the folding table, "and this time the board…
The Director Fired the Nursing Aide for Stealing—Then the Cabinet Fob Log Showed Whose Badge Opened It at 2:03 A.M.
The director's palm cracked down on the medication-room counter while the pill tray was still in my hands. "You took from the cart at…
The HOA President Fined Me $650 for a Pool Gate — Then the Log Showed Her Own Fob at 2 A.M.
The violation sticker landed on the folding table in front of me dated April 12 — the night I was three states away at…
She Shamed Me for a Junkyard Yard — My Doorbell Cam Caught Who Really Dumped It
"Your junkyard is why my property value dropped, Frank!" Brenda slammed the violation photo down on the table, and the whole clubhouse leaned in…