I told her to take it out. She told me to call the board if I had a complaint, and then she remembered, with a small pleasure, that she was the board. The nephew finished his paperwork on our hood. I photographed that too. When my wife came home she did not cry. She put the groceries on the porch because she could not pull into her own bay, and she looked at the card on the dash for a long time. “She wrote ‘do not touch’ on a car she put in our house,” she said. “Our house.” We paid the yard again. The scrape on my car had a cousin now, a bright arc on her bumper. We kept both estimates from the body shop and did not repair them yet. Evidence, she said, should stay visible until someone official has to look at it.
The third time was a Sunday dessert social. Karen used a vendor pass she had printed herself, complete with the association logo and a signature line she had signed, to convince the weekend driver that our driveway was a fire lane. It was not a fire lane. The fire lane was painted in front of the center, and it was empty, because she had not parked there. I showed the driver the hydrant map on my phone. He was already lowering her car into the bay. He said the pass was what his office told him to honor. She stood in our garage with a paper plate of lemon bars and told a woman from the pool committee that some homeowners had to be educated about shared priority. The woman laughed, not loudly. I heard it anyway. Shared priority, in Karen’s mouth, meant her paint.
The fourth time she did not bother with a paper story. She had the nephew hook our sedan while we were both at work, and she left the white car idling in the garage just long enough to set the alarm, then shut it off so that opening the side door triggered a chirp. She was across the grass in under a minute. She had been waiting for the chirp. That was the detail that moved the thing, for me, from arrogance to intention. She was not reacting to a full lot. She was arranging the lot, and arranging us.
Every time, I had to track her down at the center. Every time, she acted as if I were the unreasonable one. She made comments about disrespecting her time. She said she was doing vital work, as if a discussion of pool-furniture bids were a surgery. She said, more than once, and always loud enough for whoever was nearby, that her car was worth more than both of ours put together, and that a garage was a responsibility, not a right, when a lesser vehicle was using it. She said “lesser” without lowering her voice. She wanted the word to travel.
During the fourth confrontation I told her directly that if she towed a car from our driveway again, or put hers inside our garage again, I would have her car removed and I would call the police before I called the board. She laughed. It was not a nervous laugh. It was the laugh of a person who has been obeyed long enough to mistake obedience for law. She said the common areas belonged to the community, and she was president of the community, which meant she could stage association property wherever official business required. I told her our garage was not a common area. I told her a driveway was not a loading dock. I told her towing a legally parked vehicle from private property without the owner’s consent was not a power hiding in the bylaws between the rules about holiday lights. She smirked. She got into the white sedan. She backed it out only because a neighbor had started filming from the sidewalk, a young woman with a stroller who did not owe us anything and did it anyway. Karen drove off with one hand raised, a little wave that meant she would be back when the camera was gone.