Item three, the ratification of the special litigation assessment — one hundred and fifty dollars a
household, levied in May to fund the defense of the standards and its officers — took eleven
minutes. Marcus Bell informed the membership that one hundred and nineteen households had
paid, that seventeen thousand, eight hundred and fifty dollars stood in a segregated account, and
that twenty-five thousand dollars of retainer had been promised to counsel on the strength of it.
Ruth Abramson asked the only question the item required: whether the membership was being
asked to ratify paying, from its own pockets, for the defense of standards it had just declined to
adopt, in a criminal matter in which the association was not the defendant. The vote was forty-one
in favor, one hundred and twenty-one against, five abstaining. The assessment was not ratified. The
room then did, on Priya's motion and Harold's second, the thing Gordon's speech had warned it
against and the minutes had made inevitable: it directed the board, by a voice vote so nearly
unanimous that Elaine recorded it as carried without dissent noted, to suspend all fines under the
unadopted standards, to freeze all collections and liens arising from them pending a full accounting,
and to place the management and towing contracts before the membership with the ledgers that
belonged to them.
The election, when it came in the heat of the early afternoon, mattered in the way the last
formality always matters: it was the one the nine years could not survive being written down. Three
seats stood for election. Elaine Cho stood again — her candidacy changed, sometime in May, from
succession to witness. Priya Shah stood, on the filing Ruth Abramson had checked twice. Harold
Abernathy stood, at eighty-two. Against them stood the slate as filed: Trent Halvorsen, who had
chaired the compliance drives; and Marcus Bell, whose name remained on the ballot although he
had informed the secretary, in writing, that he would not campaign. The ballots carried three votes
each, and the tellers counted them twice, at Harold's cheerful insistence that old men and new
regimes are both entitled to be checked. Elaine Cho was returned with one hundred and thirty-two
votes. Priya Shah was elected with one hundred and twenty-eight. Harold Abernathy was elected
with one hundred and nineteen. Marcus Bell received seventy-one, Trent Halvorsen sixty-two, and
neither man, it should be recorded, contested the count, then or ever. Trent sat for a moment with
his hands still folded from their long examination, then rose, crossed the clubhouse floor in front of
the whole Ridge, and shook Harold's hand, and Priya's, with the dazed correctness of a man whose
profession — the actual one, the mowing — would presumably continue. Marcus Bell walked to
the secretary's table and asked Elaine Foster, in the hearing of the room, whether his statement of
that morning was in the minutes in full. Assured that it was, he nodded, once, like a man balancing
a column, and took a seat — not at the head table, but in the third row, among the members, where,
it occurred to several people at once, he had not sat in nine years.
What remained was the presidency, which was not, under the bylaws, the membership's to elect
at an annual meeting: the board elected its officers, and the new board would not organize until
Tuesday. Gordon Pruitt understood this perfectly. It was perhaps the last piece of paper in the
building that still ran his way, and the room watched, in a silence that had learned patience, to see
whether he would spend it. He stood. He thanked the tellers. He thanked the secretary for a true
record of the meeting — a sentence no one in the room had ever heard him say, and which Elaine
Foster wrote down with a hand that was not entirely steady, because she understood, before the
room did, what it cost and what it announced. "I have been president of this association for nine
years," he said. "I believed the work required a watcher. The membership has today read the record
of the watching, and voted, and I will not preside over the appeal of my own defeat, because there
is no appeal; there is a minute, and the minute is correct." He informed the meeting that he would
tender his resignation as president, and as a director, to the board at its organization on Tuesday,
effective on its acceptance, and that until then he would sign nothing. He picked up the folder. He
did not pick up the ruler; it stayed in his jacket, and stayed there, as far as anyone on Sycamore
Hollow Court ever knew, for good. At the back of the room Lois Callahan stood, unassisted this
time, and applauded — once, twice — not in triumph, she said later, but because a record that ends
correctly should be acknowledged like a hymn; and the room, after a hesitation that belonged to its
better nature, applauded with her, briefly and without cheering, for the minutes, for the figures, for
the door being where she had chosen it. The meeting adjourned at twenty minutes to three, into a
heat that had softened nothing, and the annual report's refreshments — lemonade, and cookies
bought, by a coincidence nobody arranged and everybody noted, by Elaine Foster — were served at
last, five hours late, to the largest annual meeting in the history of Halloway Ridge, which ate them