Brenda shouted subsection 47B at the phone, as if the operator kept a copy of our covenant at the console. She told the sidewalk that I was interfering with an emergency. A man with a muffin stopped. A woman in scrubs filmed, not subtly. I stayed in the driver’s seat because leaving would have looked, on a video, like abandonment, and because the car was mine and I was not going to surrender the wheel to a woman who had entered it like a boarding party. The song ended. The radio went to a commercial for window replacement. Brenda talked over it. Twelve minutes, she kept saying. Twelve minutes, as if a gnome hearing were a cardiac event.
Two police cruisers pulled up within eight minutes, which had to be some kind of record for our side of town. Officers Daniels and Ramirez approached the car cautiously, the kind of posture usually reserved for actual dangerous criminals, far more than necessary for someone whose strongest weapon was her ability to recite codes by heart. I kept my hands on the wheel until Daniels asked me to lower them. He had the look of a man who had been told “HOA” on the radio and had not believed it until he saw the blazer.
Officer Daniels was a tall man with kind eyes and a mustache that seemed transported straight from the nineteen-eighties. He leaned against my driver’s door. “Good morning, sir,” he said professionally. “You reported someone trespassing in your vehicle.” I nodded and gestured toward Brenda, who was sitting stiffly, arms crossed, glaring at everything within fifty feet, as though the universe itself had personally offended her. Daniels circled around to the passenger side. “Ma’am, I need you to exit the vehicle.”
Brenda straightened her blazer and tilted her chin up, as if preparing to deliver a royal decree. “Officer,” she began, using the tone she usually reserved for scolding homeowners about trash-can placement, “I am the president of the Cedar Ridge Estates Homeowners Association, and under subsection 47B of our community guidelines, I have full authority to requisition resident vehicles during declared emergencies.” She produced a laminated card from her purse and waved it like a badge of office. “I have jurisdiction here.”
The card was not a badge. It was an HOA identification card, the kind the board printed at the office store, with her photo and the gold-thread title reduced to toner. Officer Ramirez, who looked like he was maybe twelve but was probably a fully trained twenty-five, turned away slightly to hide a grin. Officer Daniels, to his credit, kept a straight face. “Ma’am,” he said calmly, “that’s not how the law works. HOA rules don’t override state or federal law. Exit the vehicle now, or you will be placed under arrest for trespassing.”