Chapter 2: The Harringtons
The Harringtons lived four doors down, in the house with the stone facade and the lawn that looked ironed. They had arrived six years ago from a larger house in a more expensive suburb, a move Diane Harrington described, at the first block party, as downsizing, in the tone of a queen discussing a smaller palace. Richard Harrington sold something in Chicago and Denver and occasionally Houston — commercial insurance, or possibly entire buildings; the street had never settled the question — and he was gone so often and so completely that his presence, when it occurred, had the quality of a weather event: noted, discussed, and not expected to last.
Diane, at fifty-five, had the energy of a weather system too, and she had found her climate in the homeowners' association. She was not the president. The president was a mild retired engineer named Gerald who mostly wanted to discuss drainage. Diane was the secretary, the treasurer's conscience, the architectural review committee, and the unofficial ministry of standards, and she wielded the covenant the way other people wield family Bibles — frequently, selectively, and with total confidence about which passages applied to whom. She knew the permitted height of a fence to the quarter inch. She knew the approved palette of shutter colors and the exact shade at which a mailbox became, in her word, an eyesore. She had once measured, with an actual tape, the distance between the Parkers' trash cans and their garage door, and she kept the photograph. She kept the photograph in a folder, and the folder in her hall closet.
People on Maple Court were polite about Diane the way people are polite about a hornets' nest in a tree they all have to walk past: carefully, and with respect for the physics involved. She was not a villain. She brought a very good potato salad to the block party, and she had organized, genuinely and well, the meal train when old Mrs. Abernathy broke her hip. But she had a gift for making her preferences feel like ordinances, and her disapproval arrived like a parking ticket — quietly, under the wiper of your day, discovered hours later and impossible to un-receive.
And then there was Tyler.
Tyler Harrington was twenty-four years old, and he had the particular softness of a young man who had never once been required to finish anything. He had attended two colleges and completed neither, begun a career in real estate and a venture in cryptocurrency and a certification in personal training, and completed none of those either, though his explanations for each were polished to a shine. He lived in the room over the Harringtons' garage, which Diane referred to as the apartment, and he kept hours that belonged to no known time zone. His one finished, gleaming, undeniable accomplishment sat in the Harrington driveway under a fitted cover, and on weekends, when he lifted the cover with the ceremony of a man unveiling a monument, the whole street learned again that it was a Porsche 911, red the color of a fire alarm, purchased — in the version Diane told at the mailbox — with Tyler's investments, and in the version the street told itself, with Richard's money and Richard's guilt for all those years in Chicago and Denver and Houston.
Tyler drove the Porsche the way other young men play video games: loudly, briefly, and mostly to be seen doing it. He took it to the gas station. He took it to the smoothie place three blocks away. He circled the neighborhood on summer evenings with the windows down and the exhaust making its expensive announcement, and the street, which was fond of its quiet, forgave him most of it, because Maple Court was forgiving by design and because everyone understood that Richard would eventually sell the car, or Tyler would eventually wreck it or grow up, whichever came first. Mike, who fixed two of the street's snowblowers every winter and charged in cookies, held the majority view: the boy was not wicked, just unfinished, and a car like that was a lot of horsepower to hand an unfinished person.
What the street did not say out loud, though Sarah said it once to Mike in the privacy of their kitchen, was that Diane's rules had a geography. The covenant covered Maple Court like a blanket — except for one house, where it mysteriously became a suggestion. Mailbox heights, lawn standards, the famous ordinance about vehicles parked on the street overnight: all of it applied with great moral force to everyone except the young man over the garage, whose car sometimes slept at the curb for three days and whose mother, somehow, never saw it with her measuring eyes. Mike had laughed and said every kingdom has a prince. He would think of that laugh later, the way you think of the last thing you said before the phone call that changes the subject of your life.