Whitfields'. We noted the Reyes fence. If we also swam—" a pause, the first
of the evening, "—if we also used the water that was sitting there, going
green in spirit if not in fact, while its owners were in Atlanta and at funerals
and God knows where, then I will tell you honestly that I regarded it as the
community using what the community maintained. The standards of this
neighborhood did not keep themselves. For nine years they were kept by the
only woman in this room willing to do the unglamorous work of keeping
them, and if my methods were—" she searched, and found the phrase she had
clearly carried in with her, the one she had rehearsed in the car, "—if my
inspections were real in spirit and imperfect in paperwork, then I will stand
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on the spirit, and let the paperwork say what it says."
She stopped. And Colin, listening, understood that she had arrived at the end
of it and was surprised to find herself there: it was the sound of a worldview
discovering it has no second sentence. The creed had been stated entire —
the assets, the spirit, the standards, the one willing woman — and there was
nothing behind it, no apology forming, no smaller honest thing waiting to be
said in its place. She looked out at the folding chairs for the nodding heads
she had always been able to find there, and the folding chairs looked back at
her with the faces of people who had been read their own addresses.
"Resolution One," Oakes said, into the silence, with the care of a man
reading a name off a stone. "The chair will entertain—"
"I withdraw my second." It was the board's own vice president, a man named
Delacroix who had seconded the resolution that afternoon with a phone call
and had sat through the evening without once looking up from a spot on the
table the size of his own conscience. "For the record. I withdraw it."
"The resolution falls for want of a second," Oakes said. "The floor recognizes
the treasurer's motion."
The recall was not, strictly, the treasurer's motion — it came from the floor,
from Mrs. Petersen's husband, standing in the back with his wife's purse still
in his hand because he had never put it down: that the membership recall
Valerie Kessler from the office of president, effective tonight, and refer the
reason to the minutes as cause shown. The show of hands was so general that
Oakes counted it twice, the second time more slowly, the way a man
recounts money he has been handed by someone he loves, looking for the
mistake and not finding it. It carried the way weather carries.
The board's motions followed like furniture being moved out of a house in
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the rain — efficiently, and with a sadness nobody bothered to disguise.
Suspension of the president pending audit: carried. The fines against
Fourteen Heron Court — nine thousand six hundred dollars, assessed across
three summers for hedge heights, for a mailbox, for obstructing a committee
that had been swimming in his pool while it fined him — were voided in a
companion motion nobody argued. The full record of the evening, exhibits
included, was voted to the District Attorney's office, on Benson's phrasing,
"for such action as the facts may warrant," and the ayes on that one came
from the front row too — from Becca Halston, whose hand went up with her
notebook still clutched in it, and from Gwen Park, sitting two rows back
among the residents, whose hand rose last and stayed up longest.
Then Oakes stood, and walked around the board table, and with a gentleness
that Colin found harder to watch than anything else in the evening — harder
than the photographs, harder than Ron's question — he lifted the president's
gavel from the podium where Val had laid it, and he held it a moment, not
knowing where a thing like that was kept, and then he set it down on the
secretary's own blotter, beside the minutes, among the ordinary instruments
of record, and Val watched it go the way you watch a light recede down a
road you used to drive.
People left the way people leave a church after a funeral that has gone on
longer than the grief — in twos, quietly, with casseroles of conversation for
the parking lot. The circle did not leave together. That was the last fact of the
evening and somehow the saddest: five women in pastels going out five
separate doors of the same room, into the same dark, at five different speeds.
Outside, the September night was warm as bathwater and loud with crickets,
and the clubhouse lot was lit by the two lamps the association had been
meaning to upgrade since spring. Colin stood by his truck with the banker's
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box on the tailgate — lighter now; the originals of half of it were with
Detective Kim, who had departed through the kitchen with her notebook and
copies of everything, nodding once at Colin on her way past in a manner that
promised nothing and therefore meant a great deal. Benson's car was gone.
Walter had been driven home by a neighbor, with Lorraine Faye's resigned