Val herself stood at the podium in a cream suit with the gavel in her hand โ
not resting on the block, held, the way a realtor holds a key at an open house,
as a promise of the door she is about to open for you. She had called this
meeting, moved the annual meeting up three weeks, because she believed the
room was hers. She believed it the way she believed the covenants were hers.
53
The agenda, printed on her cream stock, had one item of substance, and she
read it now in the warm, carrying voice that had sold half the houses on his
street.
"Resolution One," she said. "In the matter of Colin Avery, of Fourteen Heron
Court. The board moves to revoke the voting rights and amenity privileges of
the member, on grounds of sustained harassment of association officers and
volunteers, obstruction of a duly constituted inspection committee, and
conduct unbecoming the standards of this community. The board further
notes fines outstanding against the property in the amount of nine thousand
six hundred dollars." She let the number settle. "We'll hear the board's
presentation first. Then, time permitting, the member may speak."
Time permitting. Colin looked at the agenda in his lap and at the small print
under the item, and felt Laura Benson, on his right, shift in her chair with the
particular stillness of a woman who has found the line she was waiting for
somebody to read aloud.
On his left, Walter Simmons sat with his cane hooked over his knee and his
good ear turned toward the podium. Walter was seventy-eight and had lived
in Heron Bay since the streets were sand, and he had come tonight in a jacket
and tie despite the heat, because, he had told Colin on the walk over, "a man
should dress for the hanging, whichever side of the rope he's on." He reached
over now and put two fingers briefly against Colin's wrist, the way you'd
check a pulse, and took them away again.
Benson's box sat between her feet; nobody in the room knew what was in
either box except the three people in the third row and, possibly, the woman
standing at the back wall with a notebook, not drinking the coffee either.
Detective Sarah Kim had the stillness of furniture. She had been introduced
to no one. She had not needed to be.
54
Val began the board's presentation the way she began everything, by making
a story of it, and Colin listened to his own life being narrated back to him in
the third person, in a voice full of sorrow.
She was sorry, she said, to bring the community to this. Nobody at this table
took pleasure in it. But the association had obligations. For some years now
โ she let the years be vague and heavy โ Mr. Avery had been, and here she
chose the word like a stone from a bowl, fixated. On the association. On its
volunteers. On her, personally, as its president. Letters. Demands for records.
Cameras installed and re-aimed. Accusations, circulated to the district's
office and to the police, that the association's own inspection committee โ
women who gave their Wednesdays, their whole Wednesdays, to walk this
community's properties and keep its standards โ had been engaged in
something sordid in the performance of their duties. She spoke about the
loneliness of men who lose their wives and turn their grief outward, toward
the people nearest them, toward the women who had organized the casserole
rotation the winter Margaret Avery died, and been repaid, some of them,
with surveillance.
"Forty people in this room," Val said, "have eaten at this man's table. He
knows your children's names. And this is where his grief has brought him โ
to standing in the dark outside his own fence, watching women swim, and
calling it evidence." She let that sit a moment. "The board does not ask you
to dislike him. The board asks you to protect the volunteers who keep this
community worth living in, and to let this end."
It was well done. Colin could admit that, the way you admire the finish on a
cabinet you are about to take apart. She had given them a lonely widower, a
fixation, a company of traduced ladies, and a community defending itself โ
and Marcia Dunn, in the peach, was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue she had
55
clearly brought for the purpose.
Ron Dunn sat at the board table with the treasurer's ledger unopened in front
of him and a banker's box of his own under the table. He did not look at his
wife. He looked at the box.
"Before the vote," Val said, "the board will take a short statement fromโ"
and that was when Benson stood up.
She did it without hurry, in the middle of Val's sentence, the way a person
stands in a courtroom who has done it ten thousand times. "Point of order,
Madam President."
"The board has the floor," Val said.
"The board has the agenda," Benson said pleasantly. "The bylaws have the
floor. Article Nine, Section Four, as amended. I believe the amendment was
yours, Madam President โ 2022, the governance modernization package. In
any proceeding to discipline a member, and I quote the sense of it, the