I wanted to believe her. I really did. I had just moved into my first home. I wanted to be the guy who waved at his neighbors and showed up to the cookout. I did not want to be the guy with a legal dispute. So I waited, and Ranger and I settled in, and the days went by, and on the first Thursday of the month I did not go to the board meeting because Denise had said it would all be fine, and on the following Monday another letter arrived.
The second letter was shorter and not polite at all. It said the board had reviewed my request and denied it. It said Section 4.2 was clear. It said that allowing my dog to remain would constitute an undue burden on the community and fundamentally alter the nature of the association. It said the fourteen-day cure period had now expired and fines of fifty dollars per day were accruing. It said that if the violation was not cured within ten additional days, the association would refer the matter to its attorney and place a lien on my property for the unpaid fines and legal fees. It was signed, again, by Vanessa Aldridge.
I sat at my kitchen table with that letter in my hand and felt the noise in my head get louder. Ranger came over and put his head on my knee, the way he does when he feels the change in me before I feel it myself. I put my hand on his head and breathed, and I counted, the way the therapist at the VA taught me to count, and when I could think clearly again, I did the math. Fifty dollars a day. Five hundred a month. Six thousand a year, plus attorney's fees, plus a lien on the first home I had ever owned, all because a woman I had never met had decided that a federal statute did not apply to her neighborhood.
That evening I took Ranger for a walk around the block, the way we did every evening, and that was when I met Marisol Vega. She lived three doors down at 108 Mesquite, and she was out watering the little bed of marigolds by her front step when we passed. Ranger is a friendly dog. He stopped. He always stops. Marisol laughed and asked if she could pet him, and I said yes, and she scratched him behind the ears and said, "He's beautiful. What's his name?" I told her, and she told me hers, and we stood there in the evening heat talking the way neighbors talk, about the weather and the water pressure and whether the fountain at the entrance was ever actually going to work right. Then she glanced at the vest on Ranger's back, and her smile changed a little, and she said, "You got one of those letters, didn't you."
I asked her what she meant. She told me to come inside for a glass of sweet tea, and I did, and over the next hour I learned that Marisol Vega was a retired elementary school teacher, sixty-one years old, widowed, living on a pension and Social Security, and that she knew more about the Willow Creek Preserve Homeowners Association than anyone I had yet met. She told me about the Hendersons at 212 Cypress, whose daughter used a wheelchair and who had been fined for installing a ramp on their own front steps without architectural approval. She told me about old Mr. Abernathy on Juniper, a Korean War veteran, who had been threatened with a lawsuit over a flagpole. She told me about the special assessment two years ago, forty-two hundred dollars per household, supposedly for repaving the parking areas, and how the parking areas had never been repaved. She told me about the landscaping contract, and the insurance policy, and the reserve fund that the treasurer's reports said was healthy but that nobody had ever actually seen audited. And she told me about Vanessa Aldridge.
Vanessa Aldridge had been president of the board for nine years. She lived in the largest unit in the community, a corner townhouse on Live Oak Lane with a wraparound patio and a pergola. She had been a real estate agent before she retired, and she ran the HOA the way Marisol described it, like a small kingdom. Board meetings were held at seven in the evening on the first Thursday of every month in the community clubhouse, and homeowners were technically allowed to attend, but Marisol said that anyone who asked too many questions found themselves on the wrong end of a violation letter within the week. Two board members had resigned in the last three years, and both had sold their units and moved away within months. The management company, Cordero Property Management, was run by a man named Rick Cordero, who Marisol said was Vanessa's cousin's husband, though nobody could ever quite prove it. "I'm not telling you this to scare you," Marisol said, refilling my glass. "I'm telling you because you seem like a nice young man, and I want you to know what you're dealing with."