Chapter 16: The Recall
The petition appeared on a Tuesday morning, taped inside the lid of the community mailbox kiosk where everyone collected bills and seed catalogs, and by Wednesday it had acquired a second page.
Dan Whitaker had not started it. He wanted that understood, and he said so to anyone who asked, which was often, usually at the end of his own driveway, usually while he was holding a watering can or pruning shears. The petition had been started by Marisol Vega from Lot Fourteen, whose crape myrtle had been "corrected" the previous spring, and by Tom and Adele Brennan from Lot Nine, whose hedge had been lowered by a foot and a half while they were visiting their daughter in Raleigh. Both households had sat in the community room the night Dan presented his evidence file. Both had gone home and read their bylaws.
The bylaws, it turned out, had a great deal to say. Article Seven allowed any twenty percent of homeowners to petition for the recall of an officer, and twenty percent of Willow Bend was eleven households. Marisol got eleven signatures before lunch on the first day, standing at the mailbox kiosk with a clipboard and a thermos, greeting her neighbors with the practiced warmth of a woman who had once sold real estate for thirty years.
"I'm not asking anyone to be angry," she told Dan, when he stopped on his way back from the school bus stop with Lily. "Angry fades. Signatures stay filed."
Brenda Kessler began her own rounds on Thursday. She dressed for them the way she dressed for everything, in slacks and a cardigan the color of oatmeal, her hair set, her smile arranged. She carried no clipboard. She carried concern.
She visited the Hendersons and explained, over their front fence, that standards were the only thing standing between Willow Bend and a neighborhood where people parked boats in driveways and let dandelions make decisions. She visited the Cho family and spoke about property values with the gravity of a weather report. She visited the Parkers, new parents, and said the words "go downhill" three times in four minutes, gently, as though downhill were a place she had personally visited and barely escaped.
What she did not carry, anywhere, was the file. And the file was the problem, because the file had been copied. Janice Okafor, who took minutes the way other people took vitamins, had made forty copies of the evidence packet for the board meeting, and forty copies had gone home in forty tote bags, and tote bags, in Willow Bend, were forever.
Dan did not campaign. Priya asked him, on the second night, whether he thought he should, and he considered the question with the seriousness he gave to soil pH.
"If I knock on doors, it becomes me against her," he said. "It isn't. It's the bylaws against what she did. The bylaws don't need me to knock."
Instead, he answered questions. When Mr. Abernathy from Lot Three stopped him by the mailbox and asked, in the tone of a man defusing something, whether it was true that Brenda had meant well, Dan said that meaning well was probably true and also not the question. The question was whether one signature could spend the association's money and cut another man's trees, and the work order had one signature, and here it was, and Mr. Abernathy was welcome to look. Mr. Abernathy looked for a long time. Then he asked where Marisol kept the clipboard.
Lily, who was twelve and therefore fluent in the politics of any enclosed system, reported that the recall was the only subject of conversation at the bus stop, ahead of a rumored snow day and somebody's cousin's dirt bike. "Mrs. Delgado says her mother is voting yes because of the hedge," she announced at dinner. "Her mother doesn't even live here. But she's voting yes in spirit."
By Sunday the petition had thirty-one signatures. By the following Wednesday it had forty-four, which was more than half the neighborhood and more than the bylaws required. Marisol delivered it to Janice in a manila envelope at the mailbox kiosk, with the small ceremony of two women who understood paperwork. Janice logged it, stamped it, and scheduled the special meeting for the last Saturday of the month, as the bylaws directed, in the community room, at ten in the morning.
Brenda called Dan that evening. Her voice was polished and wounded, a combination she had rehearsed in the mirror of her hallway.
"Daniel," she said, "I hope you understand what you're setting in motion. Neighborhoods don't recover from this kind of division."
"I'm not setting anything in motion, Brenda," Dan said. "You set it in motion with a chainsaw. The rest of us are just writing it down."
He hung up gently, and went out to water his yard, and the stumps, in the evening light, held their rings up to the sky like six small, patient witnesses.