way he had learned to bear things, upright and without flinching.
Colin's own part in the new order arrived on a wet Saturday in January, in the
person of a locksmith the association sent round with a clipboard and a drill.
Under the Lawson rules there was no master list to surrender, only each
household's own gate to re-key to a code of the house's choosing β and
82
Colin stood in his driveway in the rain with the man's umbrella held over
both of them and chose, for the first time in the pool's life, a number that
belonged to his house alone: the month and the year the pool had been
finished, the June of it, June's own June, which he had never used for
anything but anniversaries. The locksmith punched it in and handed him the
little card and left him the only copy, with the new policy's plain sentence at
the bottom β the association retains no copy β and Colin stood there a
moment with the rain spotting the card, testing the latch twice, three times,
the way a man tests a step he has just repaired. It clicked the way a latch is
supposed to click. It answered to one house. He had not understood, until the
sound of it went through him like a note through water, how much of the last
two years had been the sound of a lock that answered to somebody else.
The first lawful inspection came in February, and it came the way the new
rules said things would come: as a letter, written notice, ten days ahead,
requesting his written consent to walk the yard and check the pool barrier
and the gate's self-closing hinge. He signed the consent at his kitchen table
and mailed it back in the envelope provided, and on the appointed morning a
young county inspector with a tape measure and a laminated checklist
knocked β actually knocked, and waited to be let in β and the two of them
walked the fence line together while Colin pointed out the hinge he'd
replaced in November and the inspector made his marks and pronounced the
yard in compliance in the tone of a man reading a favorable forecast. It took
eleven minutes. Colin thought about all the entries into that yard that had
taken less, and asked less, and he found he did not begrudge the eleven
minutes at all. A knock, he reflected, locking the gate behind the inspector's
car, was a small technology, older than locks, and it changed everything it
touched β like water, like ink, like most of the things that had decided the
case.
83
The minutes and the vendor contracts would be published to every
homeowner, monthly, in full. "Sunlight," Peggy said, when someone asked
whether all that paper was necessary, "is cheaper than litigation, and it
doesn't bill by the hour."
The binder itself β the three-ring master registry, tabbed and sleeved, that
Val had kept the way other women kept a scepter β was disposed of at the
February meeting, which Colin did not attend. He heard about it from three
porches, the way he heard everything that winter, and the three versions
agreed on the essentials and differed only in decoration: the binder brought in
by the new secretary; the pages fed in batches into the community room's
shredder while Peggy read the new code policy aloud, paragraph by
paragraph, in her principal's voice; the machine jamming twice on the plastic
sleeves and having to be coaxed, which Ron's version β the porch version
Colin believed most β reported without commentary: "Jammed twice.
Seemed right." Walter's version included applause, which Walter may have
supplied himself, in memory if not in fact, but Colin did not begrudge him
the embellishment. A binder is only paper and plastic. What had been
shredded, all three porches agreed, was the idea that any one person's pocket
was a fit place to keep the keys to eleven houses.
By March, the reports reaching Colin had changed their character. Val was at
the community pool on the mornings the parks department opened it, doing
her hours with a skimmer and a bucket and the gray shirt of county service,
and nobody on three porches had heard a word of complaint out of her,
which the porches agreed was the most astonishing sentence of the year.
Colin did not drive over to look. He had spent a summer having his privacy
watched by people who had no right to it, and he was not going to spend the
spring returning the favor; he noted her hours the way he noted weather in
other counties β with interest, and from a distance, and without dressing for
84
it.
When the community pool posted its summer hiring, Becca Halston applied
for the front desk. Her interview reached Colin thirdhand, by way of Walter
by way of the parks supervisor's assistant, and it arrived in his kitchen worn
smooth as a coin from the telling: the supervisor had asked whether she
understood the responsibility of the gate β the sign-ins, the memberships,
knowing at all times who belonged in the water and who did not β and
Becca, who had once greeted Val's paying guests at other people's fences