He laughed. He was easy to talk to in a way that made you forget he was also the sort of neighbor who actually read HOA meeting minutes. Sam had a wife, two kids, a house he kept in good repair, and a general belief that if everybody just followed the rules and talked things through, most problems sorted themselves out. It was a decent belief. It just had never been tested on anything that mattered much.
"Celeste stopped by our place last week," he said, after a pause that was meant to look casual and mostly succeeded. "Just checking in. She mentioned the tank."
"Did she," I said.
"She's pretty set on the standards thing," he said. "I told her I hadn't really thought about it. I mean, it's your place. But she says people notice it."
"People notice a lot of things," I said. "Most of them don't fine you for it."
He winced, slightly, the way people do when a joke lands a little closer to the truth than they expected. "I'm not saying she's right. I'm just saying she's organized. She has a whole folder."
"She does," I said. "Burgundy. I've seen it."
The dog stood up, reconsidered, and sat down again. Sam took a sip of his coffee and looked past me toward the workshop, where the arborvitae made a green wall and the white curve of the tank showed above it in one place, if you knew where to look.
"You've been here a while, right?" he asked.
"Nine years with the tank," I said. "Longer with the land, in a manner of speaking. The land's been here longer than all of us."
He nodded like that was a reasonable thing to say, which it was, and also like it didn't quite answer the question he had actually asked, which it didn't. We talked about the weather and the road and his son's bicycle, which had a brake problem I offered to look at sometime, and then he headed back toward his house with the dog trotting beside him.
It was a friendly conversation. It was also, I understood, a reconnaissance mission conducted by a nice man who leaned toward the board because the board was where the paperwork lived. I didn't hold it against him. I filed it away, the way I filed everything else: quietly, and in order.
Sam asked about the road next, because the road was the one thing everybody in Cedar Hollow agreed on: it needed grading after a hard rain, and nobody wanted to pay for it alone. I told him I had already put in my share, which was true, and that the gravel on my drive was my own problem, which was also true. He nodded at that, satisfied in the way people are satisfied when a conversation stays inside familiar territory.
His son came running up then, breathless, with a question about whether the bicycle brake could be fixed before the weekend. Sam looked at me, and I said to bring it by on Sunday and I would take a look, no promises, no charge for looking. The boy grinned and ran off again, and Sam watched him go with the particular expression fathers get when they are proud and worried at the same time and trying not to show either one too plainly.
"I appreciate that," Sam said.
"It's a brake," I said. "Brakes are meant to be fixed."
We stood there a little longer, two men at a fence with coffee going cold, and I thought about how easy it was to like Sam and how complicated it was to know what a person would do when a neighborhood argument stopped being abstract. Right now the tank was a topic for Celeste's folder. It was not yet a problem that touched his house, or his winter, or his kids' hot showers. I did not say any of that. I just shook his hand when he left, and watched the dog trot after him, and went back to the regulator swap, which at least had the decency to be a problem with a visible solution.
Chapter 11
The county archives lived in a low brick building that smelled faintly of damp paper and old radiators, the kind of place where the fluorescent lights buzzed just loudly enough to remind you that you were not the building's first priority.
The clerk at the front desk was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain and a manner that suggested she had seen every variety of person who came looking for a piece of paper that would solve their life. She listened to what I wanted — the original propane distribution agreement for my parcel, recorded sometime in the late eighties — without any visible change of expression.
"You'll want the grantor-grantee index first," she said. "Halvorsen, you said?"
"Halvorsen farm estate," I said.