Chapter 3: The Notice
The letter arrived on Thursday, in a cream envelope with the Willow Bend Estates letterhead and Brenda's name in the return corner, and Dan knew before he opened it that it was not a thank-you for the lattice screen. Official HOA paper had a particular stiffness to it, like a collar starched for church.
He opened it at the kitchen counter while Priya read over his shoulder, smelling of the sharp hand soap from the hospital.
"Violation Notice," she read. "First notice. Non-conforming plantings."
The letter, in courteous and implacable prose, informed the Whitakers that the six young trees recently installed along the side yard of 14 Foxglove Lane were in violation of Article VII, Section 4 of the covenants, on two grounds: first, that they had been planted within the side-yard setback, too close to the property line shared with 18 Foxglove Lane; and second, that the species selected did not appear on the Association's Approved Planting List. The letter allowed thirty days to remove the plantings or submit a variance request, and it closed with the hope that the matter could be resolved "in the spirit of shared standards that makes Willow Bend home."
"Too close to the line?" Dan said. "I measured from the pin. Twice. I measured from the pin with the good tape, Priya. The steel one."
"I know you did, honey. I watched you do it the second time, for fun, on a Sunday."
He went to the study and came back with the binder β the actual binder, the sixty-three-page covenant binder, its tabs worn soft β and the closing folder from the purchase, which contained the plat of their lot folded into a square that had forgotten how to be flat. They spread it on the kitchen table like a treasure map. There was the lot: a neat rectangle, the house footprint, the side boundary running in a straight line down to the street. And there, in Dan's own pencil from November, was the row β six small circles, each one a careful nine feet inside the line, because Dan had read Section 4 and had chosen nine feet precisely so that no one could ever have this conversation with him.
"Well," Priya said, "someone is having it anyway."
Brenda came by that evening, in person, which Dan had to admit was a courtesy many HOA presidents would have outsourced to the mail. She stood on his porch in a coral jacket with the spring dusk behind her, holding a copy of the notice in a clear sleeve, as though the original might need protection from the elements of his doorstep.
"Daniel," she said warmly. "I hope you know this isn't personal. The committee drove the street Sunday and your new plantings were flagged by two separate members. The setback exists so that mature canopies don't encroach β a dogwood at twenty years is twenty feet wide, and we all share the consequences of one another's landscaping. You understand."
"I do understand the reasoning," Dan said. "I planted them nine feet from the line, Brenda. From the iron pin at the corner. The platβ"
"The Association's measurements differ," she said, still warm, in the tone of a woman delivering a weather report about rain already falling. "And then there's the species list, which is a separate matter entirely. The approved list exists so the neighborhood reads as one composition. Dogwoods are lovely, Daniel β nobody is anti-dogwood β but the understory plantings on the list are crape myrtle, holly, and the Bradford pear cultivars. The committee simply applied the guidelines as written."
"You want me to trade six native trees for Bradford pears? They split in the first ice storm and smell like a fish market."
"They read beautifully from the street," Brenda said, and smiled, and Dan understood that the conversation had not been a door opening but a door being shown to him, painted to match the house, in an approved earth tone.
She was courteous to the end. She asked after Lily by name. She complimented the redbud's color. She left the copy in its sleeve on his porch railing like a parking ticket made of good manners, and she walked home through the spring evening with her posture arranged, a woman who had done a difficult thing graciously and expected the world to arrange itself accordingly.
Dan stood in his doorway and looked down the side yard at the row β six thin trunks in the fading light, staked, mulched, watered, his.
"So," Priya said from behind him. "What's the plan, General?"
"The plan," Dan said, "is that I don't argue from memory. If she wants to talk about where the line is, we'll find out exactly where the line is, from somebody whose job it is to know." He took the plat off the kitchen table and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand. "And then we'll have the conversation again, with much better paper."