Chapter 2: Willow Bend
Willow Bend Estates had been a cow pasture until 1998, a fact the developer's brochure had translated as "rolling heritage meadows," and the Whitakers had bought into it three years ago for the usual reasons: good schools, quiet streets, a community pool, and generous sidewalks. The houses were brick and stone and tasteful siding in a palette the covenants described as "harmonious earth tones," which in practice meant forty-one shades of beige learning to get along.
Dan liked it. He said so, and without irony, which his brother in Charlotte found hilarious. He liked the cookouts on the common green, the Fourth of July parade of decorated bicycles, the way the whole street turned out with flashlights when somebody's cat got out. He liked that the covenants kept the street looking like the brochure. He had read every page before they signed β all sixty-three of them β and filed them in a labeled binder, an act Priya described as "the most Dan sentence ever spoken."
The Homeowners Association was presided over by Brenda Kessler, who lived four doors down at the corner of Foxglove Lane and Willow Bend Drive, in the house with the most photographed yard in the neighborhood. Brenda was fifty-eight, a former real-estate agent with a glossy helmet of silver-blond hair, a wardrobe of tailored jackets in all seasons, and a genuine gift for remembering every resident's name, closing date, and one mild transgression. She ran Willow Bend the way she had once run open houses: with refreshments, a clipboard, and the serene conviction that presentation was a moral category.
Twice a week she walked the streets with that clipboard, in walking shoes, noting what she called "opportunities for compliance." A trash can still at the curb on Wednesday afternoon was an opportunity. A basketball hoop left in a driveway overnight was an opportunity. The Hendersons' mailbox, painted a deep and handsome navy by a grandfather who had not consulted the approved palette, had been an opportunity that lasted eleven weeks, three letters, and one neighborhood-wide email thread, before the mailbox returned to covenant black and Brenda sent a note thanking the Hendersons for "restoring our shared curb appeal."
Her husband, Gary, was a tall, quiet man of sixty who had retired from an insurance company and now devoted himself to his roses, his grill, and the diplomatic art of being married to Brenda in public. At cookouts he could be found turning sausages and saying, "Well, Brenda handles the standards committee," in the tone of a man describing weather that happened to other people. Dan liked Gary. Most people did. It was widely understood on Foxglove Lane that Gary's roses, which were spectacular, benefited from being beneath notice, since the approved planting list had opinions about thorns.
Dan's frictions with the HOA, such as they were, had so far been minor and almost affectionate. In his first summer he had been reminded that vegetable gardens belonged in rear yards, screened from the street, and he had moved his tomato trellis six feet without a murmur, because the rule was in the binder and the binder was fair. He had once received a notice about his recycling bin being visible from the road, and had laughed and built a lattice screen, and Brenda had admired the screen at the fall festival with what seemed like sincerity.
"She's not a villain," he told Priya once, after a board meeting that had run long on the subject of holiday lighting. "She's a curator. The whole neighborhood is her museum, and she'd like us all to stop touching the exhibits."
"Curators don't usually fine the exhibits."
"Then she's a curator with a gift shop," he said.
The truth, which Dan understood and Brenda perhaps did not, was that they were alike in one dangerous respect: both of them believed the street was worth caring about, and both of them believed care should be visible. Brenda expressed this through uniformity β every lawn striped the same direction, every hedge at regulation height, every yard a variation on a theme she could hum. Dan expressed it through a garden that changed its mind by the season and a compost pile he turned with religious regularity. For three years these two philosophies had coexisted on Foxglove Lane like neighbors themselves: politely, at a distance, each quietly certain the other would come around eventually.
So on the Monday after the planting, when Dan saw Brenda pause at the end of his driveway during her clipboard walk β saw her look down the side yard at his six trees for a long moment, make a note, and walk on β he thought little of it. He waved. She waved back, bright and brief, the way she waved at everyone. He went inside to grade lab reports, and the row of saplings stood in the spring sun, doing the invisible work that trees do, entirely unaware that they had just become an opportunity for compliance.