Chapter 1: Third Notice
“This is your third notice, Laurel,” Sheryl Pratt said, and held the envelope out over my porch railing like she was serving a subpoena. “I’d hate for there to be a fourth.”
She was standing on the public sidewalk, technically. Her toes were on the sidewalk. The rest of her leaned into my yard in a hot-pink quilted vest with a gold name badge pinned to it. SHERYL PRATT, PRESIDENT, BRIAR GLEN HOA. She’d had the badge made the week after the election. Eleven people voted.
I took the envelope. I didn’t open it. I knew what it said.
Violation 7.3(b): Excessive leaf debris on common walkway. Violation 9.1: Obstruction of community security sightline. Fine: $200.
“Sheryl,” I said, “the walkway is a sidewalk. Leaves fall on sidewalks. It’s October.”
“Your leaves.” She tipped her chin up at the oak. “Not October’s.”
Above us, the tree did what it always does in the wind, a long slow creak like a ship settling. A white oak, forty-six inches across at the chest, wider than my front door. The county extension office came out in 1998 and core-sampled it for my late husband, Tom, who was a history teacher and could not leave anything alone. They put it at a hundred and four years old. It was here before the subdivision. Before the road. Before Sheryl.
“And the sightline?” I asked.
“My doorbell camera.” She pointed across the property line at her house, a beige two-story with a new security system the size of a lunchbox mounted over the garage. “Your branches block half my driveway. Anybody could walk up to my car and I’d never see them.”
“Your car is in your garage.”
“That’s not the point.”
On my porch steps sat a mason jar half full of acorns. I teach high school biology, but every fall I still did an acorn lesson for the elementary school down the road. Count the acorns, guess the tree’s age, plant one in a paper cup. Tom started it. I’d kept it going.
Sheryl looked at the jar the way some people look at a dog bowl on a nice rug.
“The HOA doesn’t have rules about private trees,” I said. “I read the covenants. Twice. Article Nine is about fences and satellite dishes.”
“The board has interpreted it more broadly.”
“You are the board.”
She smiled with exactly half of her mouth. “I’m the president of the board. And as president, I’m telling you, as a neighbor, to have that thing trimmed back to the property line. Or the HOA will handle it.”
“Handle it how?”
“Through proper channels.” She turned to go, then turned back, and lowered her voice like she was doing me a kindness. “You’re a widow on a teacher’s salary, Laurel. You can’t afford to fight fines forever. Just trim it.”
I stood there with the envelope in my hand long after her front door closed.
I’m not a fighter. I’m the woman who stays after school to clean the gerbil cage. I paid the first fine because it was fifty dollars and I didn’t want trouble. I paid the second because I was grading midterms. This one I put in the kitchen drawer with the takeout menus.
That Monday, I flew to Denver for the state science teachers’ conference. Four days, three workshops, one hotel room with a view of a parking structure. I’d been to it every year for twenty-two years. Tom used to call it my nerd vacation.
I texted my neighbor Gloria Henderson before I left. Gone till Thursday night. Would you grab my mail?
Of course, honey. Have fun with your nerds.
On Tuesday morning, I was sitting in a breakout session on soil microbiomes when my phone buzzed in my lap.
Gloria.
No words at first. Just a photo, taken from her front window, a little blurry.
A white flatbed truck in front of my house. A wood chipper hitched behind it, orange and huge.
And a bucket lift, already extended, rising up into the branches of my oak.
Then a text.
Laurel, did you hire these men??
