Chapter 15: The Board
The emergency meeting was called for the following Thursday at the community room by the pool, because Vivian demanded a meeting, and it is one of the deep pleasures of a well-written set of bylaws that a demand, once made, cannot be unmade when the weather changes. She arrived with her folder and a printed agenda. There were ninety people in a room built for fifty. Folding chairs ran out by seven-oh-five. Walt Pruitt brought his own, with his name on it in marker, which tells you everything about Heron Court that matters.
I had not planned to run that meeting. I am retired, I am a homeowner, and I sat in the second row with a folder of my own and every intention of saying my piece in my three minutes like anyone else.
But I had prepared. Preparation is not aggression; it is just respect for everyone's time, including the truth's.
Vivian spoke first, as president, and she spoke for a long time β about standards, and property values, and the association's obligation to act on irregularities, a word she used nine times, and about how a community that stops enforcing stops being a community. Some of it was even true, in the abstract, the way a map is true in the abstract. Then she sat down, and Nora Fenn, who is sixty years old and has been treasurer of that association since before Tyler was born, raised her hand with the air of a woman who has been waiting with decreasing patience for approximately two years.
"Point of information," Nora said. "I'd like the citations against the Reyes property read into the record. All of them. With the outcomes."
That was the beginning. The file took forty minutes. I know, because I had timed it at my kitchen table the night before, to Maya, who timed me and said, "Dad, you're enjoying this," and I said, "I am informing this," which we both knew was the same thing wearing a tie.
Tab by tab. The citation for the Mustang parked at the curb on a Tuesday β the bylaws permit street parking for residents' registered vehicles, a clause I read aloud while ninety people followed along in the copies Nora had printed at the library. The citation for an unapproved structure, meaning my father's old flagpole. The citation for excessive holiday lighting, which had been issued in January, for lights taken down in December. Eleven hundred and fifty dollars in fines, every one appealed, every appeal unanswered inside the thirty days the bylaws allow β a fact Nora confirmed from the treasurer's ledger, out loud, in the tone of a woman reading a grocery list she disapproves of.
I did not raise my voice. I have been angry in rooms like that one and it has never once improved the minutes. I said what the documents said, and I sat down in my three minutes plus thirty-seven, because the file was the file and Nora, chairing that portion, let it run.
"Move to recall the president," Nora said, into the silence, "and to void the fines issued against the Reyes property as issued outside the bylaws. And while we're reading ledgers β " she turned a page, and I watched Vivian understand, a half-second before the room did, what two years of that folder had actually been β "the same review voids the fines against the Abernathy and Whitaker properties." A rustle went around the room like wind in the flags. I had not known about the other two. I think the room mostly had not known. I think that was rather the point of how the fines had been run.
The vote was not close. I will not give the count, because the count is in the minutes, and it does nobody any good to hang a number on a neighbor. The gavel β we actually have a gavel; Walt made it; it is ridiculous and it is ours β passed to Nora Fenn, acting president, to applause that started in the back and had the decency to be brief.
The apology letter was Nora's idea, official, on association letterhead, signed by the board, acknowledging the fines were void and the report β she chose the word carefully β "unfounded." Vivian, from the audience seats, where she had moved with her folder held against her like a shield, said the board couldn't do that, and Nora said, kindly, "We just did, dear. It's seconded and carried. It's in the minutes," and it was.
I walked home under a sky gone violet, with my folder under my arm, and Heron Court looked the way it looks on the good evenings, porches lit, somebody's sprinkler ticking. Sofia was waiting on my porch steps with two popsicles, in her capacity as family.
"Director," I said.
"Grandpa," she said. "Was it by the book?"
"Every page," I said, and we ate the popsicles, and that, for the record, is the whole statement.