A HOA Broke Into His Pool With Her Friends — Then the Water Exposed Every One of Them

pool had stood behind its gate in the long Georgia evenings, lit by its own

underwater light on the nights he remembered the timer, glassy and perfect

and untouched — a jewel of a pool, serviced like a showpiece by a man who

was never home to swim in it, because the man was out at dawn and back at

dark keeping forty other people's pools at exactly the same polish. He

understood now, with the letter in the logbook, how that looked from the

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street: not like a home but like a waste, a held note nobody played, and how a

certain kind of mind — an organizing mind, a mind that could not leave an

unused beautiful thing alone — would eventually talk itself into calling the

waste a wrong, and the wrong a permission. It didn't excuse anything.

Explanation was not absolution; it was just chemistry, the reading on a

sample he hadn't thought to take. He noted it in the logbook's remarks, in the

end, in his square hand, because a record that only holds the flattering

readings isn't a record: Envied it. That was the whole reagent. Underneath he

wrote the date, and turned the page, and the winter went on turning its pages

too.

The same week's mail brought the Dunns' restitution check, a personal check

under the court's schedule, signed by both of them — Ron's firm, upright

signature and beneath it Marcia's, smaller and hurried, the two hands sharing

one line like passengers in a lifeboat. Walter Simmons, who served as the

street's ministry of information, delivered the rest of the news on Colin's

porch with his coffee: the Dunns were in counseling, Thursdays, over in

Pooler. "Both of them, every week," Walter said, with the air of a man

reading out a final score. "Marcia told Gwen Park's sister, which is the same

as publishing it in the paper." Colin deposited the check without ceremony

and thought that a marriage, like a pool, was mostly a matter of what you

were willing to haul out of it by hand, a leaf at a time, all winter.

And in that same round of mail, in an envelope addressed in green crayon

with his name spelled right and his street spelled nearly right, came a

drawing from the Petersen girl. The Petersens had been among Val's paying

guests that last summer — a young couple who had believed they were

buying a family's honest membership in a swim club — and their daughter

had been sick that autumn, a long, frightening convalescence her doctors had

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finally traced back through the summer's water, and she was recovered now,

her mother wrote, quite recovered, and swimming again, and had made Mr.

Avery a picture for his pool. The picture was a rectangle of water colored in

with a blue of absolute and chemical confidence, and in it, three stick figures

stood up to their smiling waists, and over it a sun with rays like a child's

handwriting. Colin pinned it to the pump-room wall, at eye level, where the

light from the door fell on it in the mornings. He looked at it every day that

winter while the readings came up clean, and it improved every page of the

logbook it faced.

December came in gray and stayed a while, and Colin worked his route

through the short days with the logbook riding in the truck where it had

always ridden, and if the season had a headline nobody on the porches

bothered to print it. Walter put lights on his porch rail for the first time since

his wife's death — a fact the street received with the gravity due a treaty —

and stood in Colin's driveway one dusk admiring his own workmanship and

delivering the winter's whole news in one sentence: "Nothing happened this

week either, Colin. It's getting to be a habit." Colin laughed, and heard the

laugh land in the cold air like a thing the yard hadn't hosted in some time. He

thought about habits — about how a neighborhood, like a body of water, was

mostly a set of them, kept or broken daily, in small doses, by hand — and he

went in and made his readings and wrote them down, the chlorine standing

true, the page clean, the record of an ordinary December, which he had come

to understand was the most valuable document he owned.

The reforms came in with the cold weather, the way honest work usually

does, after the excitement had gone out of the thing. The special election was

monitored — paper ballots, a county observer with a clipboard and no

opinions, the community room smelling of coffee and radiator dust — and

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Heron Bay elected Margaret Lawson president of the association: Peggy

Lawson, retired after thirty years as a school principal, a woman who had run

assemblies of four hundred adolescents and was not going to be hurried by a

agenda item. Colin voted before his morning route and was in Pooler by the

time the counting started, which suited him; he had developed a preference

for learning results from people rather than from rooms.

The January meeting passed the package whole, and Walter read him the

minutes off the new published bulletin like a man reading box scores. The

master gate-code registry was abolished: from now on every household