embarrassed to own, lived in the driveway, under the open sky of Sycamore Hollow Court, in full
and continuous view of Gordon Pruitt's front windows, a circumstance that Caleb had considered
for perhaps eleven seconds before buying the house, and Gordon considered, from that first
evening onward, for a measurable portion of every day.
For the record — and there would come a time when the record mattered more than anyone on
the court could have imagined — the driveway parking of a registered passenger vehicle was not
merely tolerated at Halloway Ridge. It was expressly permitted. Article Nine of the recorded
covenants, a document filed with the county in 1998 and handed, in photocopy, to every buyer
since, said so in the flat, unlovely language of lawyers who expected to be read in court: no vehicle
might be stored inoperable, unregistered, or on the lawn; a passenger vehicle in running order
might be kept in a driveway without limit. Gordon Pruitt had read Article Nine. Gordon Pruitt had
read everything; reading was not his deficiency. His deficiency, if it can be called that in a man who
would have rejected the word, was that he believed a community had a spirit as well as a letter, and
that the spirit was his to interpret, and that a car like that — a car that announced, to every delivery
driver and visiting grandparent and prospective buyer who turned into the court, that money of a
louder kind had arrived at number nine — offended the spirit even as it obeyed the letter, and that
the spirit, in any contest between the two, ought to win.
The first notice arrived on the eighth of April. It came in the cream envelope, on the heavy
paper, and June brought it in with the rest of the mail and stood at the kitchen counter reading it
twice while the kettle came up to its small, furious boil. Architectural Standard 7.4, the letter said,
prohibited the open storage of any vehicle exceeding a luxury designation, the association having
determined that such vehicles, like commercial vehicles and recreational vehicles, were to be kept
in enclosed garages in order to preserve the uniform residential character of the community. The
vehicle identified at 9 Sycamore Hollow Court was out of compliance. A fine of fifty dollars per
day would accrue from the date of the letter until the vehicle was removed from open view or the
violation cured. The owner had a right to appeal in writing to the management company within
fourteen days. The letter was signed, in facsimile, by a compliance officer at Ridgeway whom June
had never met, and it was copied, in a distribution line as small as a whisper, to the president of the
association.
"Luxury designation," June said.
Caleb read it standing up, with his reading glasses on, the way he read everything that had
letterhead on it. He read it the way he had once read indictments drafted by other men, and motions
drafted against him: slowly, and then again from the bottom up, a habit that June teased him for and
relied on. "There is no Standard 7.4," he said at last. "I mean, there may be. But not in anything we
signed." He went to the study and came back with the closing binder, which weighed as much as a
small dog, and he found the covenants, and Article Nine, and laid the letter and the article side by
side on the counter, like two witnesses who would not agree. "This was invented," he said. It was
not an exclamation. It was a finding. "Somebody's committee wrote this after the fact, and they're
fining under it as if it were recorded. Which, if they've been doing it to other people—" He stopped,
because Sam had come into the kitchen wanting the crusts cut off, and because a man in Caleb's
line of work learns not to finish certain sentences in front of his children, or, ideally, at all.
That night, after the children were down, they did what they always did, which was that June
made the practical suggestion and Caleb made it smaller and quieter. She said they should go to the
next board meeting and ask, in public, where Standard 7.4 came from. He said that public asking,
with a man like Pruitt, would turn a paper error into a feud, and that feuds in a cul-de-sac have no
discovery process and no end. He said the letter itself had told them the correct move, the move the
system's own rules prescribed: appeal, in writing, within fourteen days, cite Article Nine, attach the
plat and the registration, ask for the recorded instrument that created the standard. Paper against
paper. "And if they say no?" June asked. "Then we have their no, in writing," Caleb said, "which is
a different and much more useful thing than their yes at a meeting, which evaporates. Trust me. In
my world, the whole game is getting the other side to put it in writing." She looked at him over her
tea. "And in the meantime the car sits there and the meter runs at fifty a day." "In the meantime,"
Caleb said, "the meter runs on a fine that doesn't exist, under a rule that doesn't exist, and every day
it runs it gets better for us and worse for them. We don't pay it. We don't move the car. We don't