The center sat so close to our side fence that on warm nights we could hear the vending machine drop a can. The pool deck was visible from our kitchen window if you stood at the sink and leaned. None of that bothered us. A neighborhood is allowed to have a common room. We had read the covenants before we signed. They were dull, which we took as a good sign. Trash bins in by evening on collection day. No livestock. No parking on the grass. Architectural approval for a fence stain. Nothing in those pages said a board president could decide that our garage was a courtesy suite for a more expensive car.
Then the annual association elections happened, and a new group took the board. I did not go to the election meeting. That is one of the sentences I have turned over since, the way you turn over a receipt you should have kept. My wife was on a double shift. I told myself the board was envelopes and newsletters and a Christmas decoration contest, and that reasonable adults could be trusted with folding chairs. I was not wrong about the chairs. I was wrong about the adults.
The new president was a woman who treated an unpaid volunteer seat as if someone had set a crown on it under the fluorescent lights. People on the block still use her given name when they are being careful. I am going to call her Karen, because that is the name the street settled on after the third tow, and because her given name stopped mattering the week she decided our garage was storage for something shinier than what we drove. She was in her early sixties, carefully kept, the sort of woman who arrived at a meeting already annoyed that the meeting had not started at the moment she parked. She drove a pearl-white luxury sedan. I am not going to pretend I know the exact sticker. I know what it looked like next to our cars. It looked like a verdict. The paint never held dust for long. The tires were never scuffed. She parked it the way some people hang a framed certificate, where you had to walk past it to reach the door she wanted you to enter.
Her husband, when he appeared at all, was a quiet man who carried her tote bag and did not join the argument. I saw him twice in those first weeks, once at the mailbox and once loading folding chairs. He nodded at me both times. He did not warn me. I do not hold that against him as a crime. I hold it against the situation, which is a softer place to put it and probably too kind.
The problem started when the new board began hosting weekly meetings and social events at the community center. A budget session. A pool-rules session. A welcome coffee that was not particularly welcoming. The small lot filled by the time the second car arrived. Overflow spilled onto the street. Parking on the street was legal in our city if you followed the ordinary rules of the road. You did not block a driveway. You did not block a garage opening. You did not block a hydrant or a crosswalk. You did not pretend the asphalt in front of someone else’s door was a reserved plaque with your name on it. Karen decided she did not want to walk from the overflow spaces down the block. She also decided that a legal curb was not grand enough for the car she had chosen to represent her office.