From that morning on, she was never rude to me in a way I could ever point at. She said, “Good morning.” She called me Mr. Reic in a tone that put an inch of glass between us. While the man three lots down was always Grant, and the woman with the roses was always Bitsy. It is a small thing to be the only one in a neighborhood who gets a last name, and it is also the clearest signal there is.
The letters started in May. The first one came in a cream envelope with the association crest on it, and it was polite the whole way through, which is how I learned that polite is not the same as harmless. It cited section 11, appearance of stored recreational equipment, and it advised me that my boat and trailer could not be visible from the roadway.
I moved the trailer behind the carport, which took me two hours and cost me a scraped forearm, and I let it go. Nine days later, a second letter cited section 14, community amenity usage, and stated that the south dock was reserved for association sanctioned access only. That one confused me because the south dock is a treated plank walkway my uncle built long before Cedar Glenn put in its first cul-de-sac and nobody from the association had ever set foot on it.
The third letter was the one that made me sit down at my kitchen table with my keys still in my hand. It informed me that any resident wishing to operate a watercraft on Brier Lake was required to purchase an annual lake recreation permit at six hundred dollars payable to the association, and that permits were reviewed for approval rather than issued automatically.
I read the paragraph twice. Then I went to the closet where I keep the folder from the closing on my uncle’s house and I read every page of it, including the pages nobody reads. There was no lake permit clause. There was no amenity agreement. There was nothing that made the association a landlord over the water behind my house. And the more carefully I looked, the more I noticed how much the letters were relying on me not looking.
I wrote Vanessa an email that night. And I kept it short because long emails give people room to answer something you did not ask. I said I had reviewed my deed and my closing documents. And I asked her to point me to the specific covenant that gave the association authority to require a permit for lake use. I asked which recorded instrument granted the association ownership of the lake bed. I asked politely.
I hit send at 9:40 in the evening and I watched the little confirmation appear and I told myself she would come back with a section number and this would be over by the weekend. She never answered the question. Four days later she answered with paper.
The envelope was heavier than the others, and inside was a violation notice with a dollar figure printed in bold two hundred fifty dollars with a note that the amount would compound at fifty dollars for each additional week of non-compliance. Under the crest in small capital letters was the line that would stay in my head for the rest of that summer. Unauthorized use of association lake property.