Vanessa Pike stood on the dock and pointed at me like I had broken into her house. “Get him off that lake,” she told the ranger, then turned back to me with a thin smile and said, “I did not buy long here.” I stayed in my aluminum fishing boat less than thirty feet from shore, one hand on the oar.
Ranger Mason Trent did not answer her right away. He opened his tablet, pulled up the county parcel map, and looked at Vanessa until her smile came apart. Then he asked one question that made the whole dock go quiet.
My name is Isaiah Reic, and for almost seven years I lived on the south side of Brier Lake without a single problem worth remembering. My house is older than most of Cedar Glenn Estates. A low brick thing with a carport instead of a garage, and it came to me from my uncle after he passed. I never redecorated much.
On weekend mornings, I would carry a thermos down the slope behind my yard, drop the aluminum boat in the shallows and paddle out past the reeds where the bass hold in cool water. I worked eighteen years as a water systems technician for the county. So I knew that lake in a way most of my neighbors never would, all the way down to the spillway grate and the drainage line that runs under the south bank.
Nobody bothered me about any of it because for six of those seven years, the association was run by a retired mail carrier who cared about potholes and nothing else. Then the potholes got fixed. The retired mail carrier moved to be near his daughter and Vanessa Pike became president of the Cedar Glenn Homeowners Association.
I met her for the first time on a Saturday in April when I was hosing the boat trailer down in my own driveway. She came up the walk in a cream jacket with her sunglasses pushed into her hair and introduced herself the way people do when they expect the name to land. Then she looked past me at the boat at the patched seat and the dented gunwale and she said the board was working hard to raise the visual standard of the community.
She said it the way a person says the weather is turning like it was simply information and I would be foolish to take offense. I told her I was glad I had not bought my house to be decoration for anybody. She laughed one note and said she could tell I had a sense of humor.