woman who cited him about his own pool, in letters full of phrases his
lawyer called aspirational, had never in her life, so far as he could tell, so
much as tested a strip. A neighborhood is a standard you can see. He would
read the letters at the kitchen table on Thursday evenings when he came
home, with the pool going dark and perfect outside the glass, and he would
think: you cannot see the standard, Valerie. That is rather the point of it. The
standard is under the surface, where I live.
Once, in the spring, she had come closer than the mailbox. The association
conducted what it called life-safety inspections of pool properties — a
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covenant provision written, in some older and more innocent decade, for
genuine emergencies — and Valerie had exercised it on a Tuesday in April
while Colin was in Macon, entering his yard through the side gate with the
association's master inspection code, which she held, as president, along with
the codes for every gate and pool enclosure in Heron Bay. It was all in the
registry, and the registry was in her office, and the covenant was plainly
worded: for floods, for fires, for a child in trouble on the far side of a fence.
She had used it on a fair Tuesday in April to measure his fence from the
inside and to note, on a form she left taped to his pump room door, that his
equipment was audible from the property line at a distance of six feet, as
whose equipment is not. He had come home Thursday to the form fluttering
on the door and had stood in his yard reading it with his bag still in his hand,
taking in the essential fact of it, which was not the fine. It was that she
walked in. The code turned in the lock, the gate swung, and the president of
the association strolled his yard in the middle of a workday with a tape
measure and a clipboard, perfectly regular, perfectly documented, perfectly
within the letter of a rule written for drowning children. He had written his
polite reply. He had enclosed the covenant page with the relevant clause
highlighted, the emergency clause, in the driest highlighter yellow he owned.
The answer had come back on cream paper, noting that the inspection
provision would be interpreted by the board that administered it. He had filed
it with the others. But he had also, that weekend, done a thing he had not
mentioned to his lawyer or his crews: he had walked his fence line the way
he walked a client's site, looking at his own property with the eyes of a man
pricing its vulnerabilities, and he had noted the gate, and the latch, and the
oleander screen June had planted for swimmers' privacy, and he had thought,
with no heat in it at all: if a person wanted to come into this yard
unwitnessed, the yard would let her. He had not changed the latch. A latch is
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a courtesy, not a wall, and he had lived long enough with water to know what
courtesy is worth against a determined season. He had simply noted it, the
way he noted everything, and gone on keeping his samples.
The job in Beaufort was a renovation, a tired hotel pool that a new ownership
group wanted brought back to a shine it had possibly never had, and it was
the kind of work Colin liked, all diagnosis and no vanity. On the Wednesday
of that week, the sky over the Lowcountry came down in a warm grey sheet
and stayed there. You cannot shoot elevations in rain like that, and you
cannot plaster, and the gunite crew stood around under the cabana roof
drinking coffee out of foam cups and watching the pool fill with weather. By
two o'clock Colin had done the arithmetic every traveling man learns to do:
the site was dead until Friday, his own house was ninety minutes away, and
Thursday's homecoming could be had a day early for the price of a wet drive.
He told the foreman to lock the chemical cage twice, because rain made men
careless, and he drove north through the rain with the wipers going and the
radio off, the way he liked to drive, listening to the truck.
The rain stopped at the county line, the way it sometimes does, as if it had a
jurisdiction. Heron Bay at six in the evening was washed and gold, the lawns
combed, the heron on the gate standing in its bronze weather with one foot
raised. Colin came down his own street past the judge's porch and the empty
driveways of the other traveling men and turned in at his house with the
simple pleasure of a day stolen back from the calendar. He parked in the
drive, because the garage had his father's old skiff in it in pieces, and he got
out with his bag over his shoulder, and he stopped. He stopped the way he
had stopped a hundred times on job sites, with his weight still moving and
his attention already gone ahead of him, because of a smell.
It was at the fence first. Smells carry wrong in a yard the way a wrong note