The next morning, the street in front of Harold's house looked like a parade staging area. There were three television vans, a dozen cars he did not recognize, and a growing crowd of neighbors, some he knew and some he had never seen. Someone had placed flowers on the Mustang's hood, a bouquet of daisies tied with a ribbon. Someone else had left a card on the windshield: "Thank you, Captain. - The Cedar Grove Families." Harold came out on the porch in his cardigan, blinking in the morning light, and the crowd, which had been murmuring, broke into applause, and Harold stood there with his coffee in his hand, utterly bewildered, while strangers called out, Thank you, Captain, and God bless you, sir, and a woman he had never met pushed through the crowd with tears streaming down her face and said, You carried my father down that ladder, you carried my daddy, and Harold held her while she cried, because that was what you did, that was the job, you held people while they cried.
Marty arrived at eight, pushing through the reporters with his toolbox, and he took one look at Harold and said, Hal, you look like hell, and Harold said, I feel like I've been run over by a tow truck, and they both laughed, and Marty said, Let's get to work, because Marty understood that the best response to chaos was useful labor. They spent the day in the garage with the Mustang up on the jack stands, Marty directing and Harold handing him tools, while outside the crowd came and went, and neighbors brought food, and Pete Dugan held court on Harold's porch, telling anyone who would listen about the old days at Station 4, and Mrs. Abernathy organized the casseroles with military precision. In the afternoon, a man in a suit arrived, introduced himself as a lawyer, and said he represented a classic car restoration shop two towns over, and his client wanted to do the work on the Mustang for free, all of it, brakes, tires, exhaust, electrical, everything, as a thank-you. Harold tried to refuse. The lawyer smiled and said, Sir, my client isn't asking. In the evening, a woman from the DMV called, on her personal time, to say she had expedited the registration paperwork and the smog exemption, and it would all be ready by Friday. Harold sat on a stool in the garage with grease on his hands and listened to all of this, and he kept shaking his head, and Marty kept saying, Hal, just say thank you, and Harold kept trying.
Diane Kessler watched it all from her window, three streets away. She watched the news coverage. She read the comments, thousands of them, calling her a monster, a tyrant, a disgrace, demanding her resignation, posting her address, which frightened her more than she would admit. She told herself she had done nothing wrong, that she had enforced the covenants as written, that the board had voted, that the rules were the rules. But at night, lying awake while Robert snored beside her, she thought about the old man in the good jacket over his pajamas, and the way the two officers had taken off their hats, and the gleaming red car, and she felt something she had not felt in years, something like shame, though she would not have called it that. She called an emergency board meeting for the following week. She told herself it was to discuss legal exposure. She did not tell Robert, or herself, that she had not slept through the night since the tow truck drove away.
The emergency board meeting was held on a Tuesday evening in the clubhouse, and it was nothing like the orderly meetings Diane Kessler was accustomed to running. The room was packed, standing room only, with residents spilling out into the hallway and the parking lot. The local news had a camera in the back. Harold was there, sitting in the front row in his good jacket, with Marty on one side and Carol, who had driven down from Ohio that morning, on the other. Maria Kowalski was there in plain clothes, on her own time, sitting quietly in the third row. Jesse was there with his mother. Pete Dugan was there with his cane. Mrs. Abernathy was there with a casserole, because Mrs. Abernathy brought a casserole to everything.