I had, in fact, forgotten about the inspection, which is the kind of thing you only forget once in your life, because the consequences teach you so thoroughly you never let it happen again.
Our HOA does an annual walk through of every garage on the block, ostensibly to check for fire code violations, though everyone privately understands it is really about making sure nobody is running a business out of their house or storing anything that might lower property values by association. I remembered all of this at 8:47 on Saturday morning, while standing in my kitchen in pajamas, at the exact moment I heard Deborah’s golf cart, the official HOA golf cart, humming up our street with the quiet menace of a woman who has never once been late to anything in her life.
Henrietta chose this precise morning to be unusually vocal.
I did the only thing a rational person could do under this kind of pressure, which is to say I did something deeply irrational. I grabbed the dog crate, Henrietta inside it, protesting loudly, and I ran, in my pajamas, across the backyard, and shoved the entire operation into the shed, behind the lawnmower, under a tarp that I do not believe has ever once been used for its intended purpose.
I got back inside with about ninety seconds to spare, out of breath, hair doing something I did not have time to address, and opened the garage door for Deborah with the strained, overly friendly smile of a man who is absolutely fine, everything is fine, nothing is happening here.
“Sam,” Deborah said, clipboard already out. “You look flushed.”
“Cardio,” I said. This was, technically, not a lie.
She walked the garage with the slow, thorough gait of a woman who has caught people before and enjoyed it. One bike. A shelf of paint cans. A single beach towel, still faintly present in the corner, that I had not had time to relocate and prayed she would not ask about. She did not ask about the towel. She asked about something worse.
“Do you hear that?” she said, tilting her head toward the backyard.
I heard it. Henrietta, muffled by a shed wall and a lawnmower and a tarp with no apparent purpose, had found a new gear, and was making a sound that could most charitably be described as an alarm.
“Wind,” I said. “Through the fence. It does that.”
Deborah looked at me the way you look at a man who has just told you, with a straight face, that wind sounds like a bird having a very specific opinion about something. She wrote something on her clipboard. I did not ask what. Some things, I have learned, are better left unknown until they arrive by certified mail.
She left. I stood in the driveway for a solid minute, heart going, before I walked to the shed, lifted the tarp, and found Henrietta sitting there with what I can only describe as an expression of profound betrayal, as if she, personally, had been humiliated by the entire ordeal, rather than me.
Anna found me like that, crouched by the shed at nine in the morning, apologizing out loud to a chicken. She did not say anything for a long moment. Then she asked how the inspection went.
“There was a small amount of wind,” I said, “that Deborah found suspicious.”
Three days later, the letter came. Not certified mail, which was somehow worse, because it meant Deborah had personally walked it to our mailbox rather than trust the postal service with something this satisfying. It requested our presence at the next HOA meeting, to “discuss a matter regarding unauthorized livestock in violation of section 4, subsection C.”
Dave, when I called him, was unhelpfully calm about the whole thing. “So we fight it,” he said, like this was a reasonable next sentence. I told him there was no fighting a woman with a clipboard and a golf cart and, apparently, extremely good hearing.
“Then we don’t fight it,” Dave said. “We charm it.”
I did not like the sound of that plan. I liked even less that, three days later, it was the only plan we had.
Chapter 3 coming soon.
