By the weekend, the campaign began.
Chapter 9: The Campaign
I have kept a calendar my whole adult life, first because the job required it and then because a man without a calendar is a man negotiating with his own memory, and memory loses. Beginning that Saturday, my calendar became a second document. In blue ink: Sofia's recital, the gutters, a dentist in Alcoa. In black ink, a new and growing column: the works of Vivian Corbett.
The first of the new citations concerned my registration. Unregistered vehicle, Section 8.1, two hundred and fifty dollars β a figure Article VII capped well below, but arithmetic, like the truth, was not the instrument being played. The theory underneath it I would learn later, and it was almost touching in its craftsmanship. Somewhere β at the picnic, or through the windshield on one of her inspection walks β Vivian had seen the old registration card in my glovebox. It bears my father's name, Ernesto Reyes, because it is a relic and relics are not updated. My actual registration is current, has been current every year since 1983, and lives where registrations live. She had glimpsed the past through glass and built a case on it: the car belonged to a dead man, the dead man could not own property, therefore the car was unregistered, therefore the two hundred and fifty dollars. A detective I once trained used to say that a theory is just a guess that has started lifting weights. Hers had been training all spring.
The second citation was for an oil spot in my driveway. One hundred and fifty dollars, Environmental Contamination, Section 14.2, which concerns itself with leaking fuel tanks and says nothing about spots. The oil spot was real enough β I will stipulate to the spot β but it was not mine. It belonged to Ellis Grant's truck, which leaks the way old trucks and old men do, from a seal nobody can afford to chase, and which Ellis had parked in my drive the previous Tuesday while we changed Midnight's oil in my garage like two surgeons over a patient we loved. I photographed the spot. I photographed Ellis's truck. I photographed the impressive matching spot in Ellis's own driveway, which forms, with mine, a sort of constellation of innocence.
The third citation measured my grass at four and a half inches, two weeks after a rain that had made every lawn on Copperleaf Court into a small, green weather event. One hundred dollars. Maximum permitted: four inches. The association's own vendor had cut the common areas to five that same week, but common areas, I was given to understand, breathe different air.
The fourth used the word commercial. Commercial Vehicle Washing Operation, Section 11.7, two hundred dollars β Section 11.7 concerns car washes, the fundraising kind, with banners β for the crime of a bucket, a sponge, and a garden hose on my own concrete, on the evening a boy had asked for my car and been refused. I keep coming back to that one, I confess. Of them all, it was the most honest. It did not pretend to be about water.
There were others, smaller, the way shrapnel is smaller. An unapproved overnight driveway parking, one hundred seventy-five dollars β my own car, in my own driveway, on the night of Sofia's recital, because my son-in-law's car was in the garage. A failure to submit an architectural review, two hundred dollars, for a birdbath I had placed by the roses β a birdbath older than the association itself, which my wife set there when the covenants were still a developer's promise and not yet a government.
Let me now do the arithmetic the board declined to do, because arithmetic is the whole of my religion. Seventy-five from the spring. Two fifty, one fifty, one hundred, two hundred, one seventy-five, two hundred since. Eleven hundred and fifty dollars, total, every cent of it disputed, every cent of it answered in writing within the cure period Article VII guaranteed me and the board pretended not to contain.
I appealed each one the day it arrived. Nora Fenn took my fourth appeal at the drop box and held it a moment before filing it. "You're the only one who answers like this, Sam," she said. "Paper, copies, deadlines." I did not threaten, I did not telephone, I did not visit Vivian's porch, though the porch and I are thirty yards apart and the weather was fine. I wrote letters. I cited sections by their true names. I attached photographs with dates burned into them the way we used to burn them into evidence stills. I calendared every deadline like a court date, because that is what they were, in the only court that had been offered to me: the court of the record.
Prue asked me once, over the fence, why I never raised my voice.
"Because the letters do it at their natural volume, Prue," I said. "And nobody can fine a man for a stamp."