She had no immediate reply. The silence between us was no longer threatening; it was merely the silence of two people who had reached the limit of what the other could accept. I realized I did not need to convince her. There would be no satisfying admission, no speech in which she acknowledged the years of trouble her arrangements had caused. I had wanted that in the beginning. I no longer did.
"You know what bothers me?" she asked finally. "You act like you're just another neighbor."
I looked at the small patch of lawn, the front steps, and my truck on the driveway. I thought of the robe hanging in my office, the black fabric that belonged to public business and would be left there when I returned home the following evening. I thought of the first police car arriving before I had unloaded the third box and the question I had been asked while standing on my own land.
"I'm just the man who lives here," I said.
Patricia looked at me for a long moment. Her face did not change, but something in the way she held the fence seemed to ease. Then she turned and walked back to her house. I heard the front door close, a small sound in an ordinary afternoon. It was quieter than the doors in my memory from those first difficult weeks, perhaps because I no longer had a reason to listen for what came next.
I turned the nozzle back on.
I finished watering the lawn, careful not to send the spray across the public sidewalk. I coiled the green hose beside the house and put the empty glass from my afternoon water on the kitchen counter. Then I stepped back outside and looked at the driveway in the long light. It was dry where the truck sat and damp where the hose had crossed it, the water darkening the concrete in a shape no one had colored on a map.
The house was mine. The driveway was mine. The garage belonged to me, and the neighbors belonged to themselves, which was as much ownership as anybody should have tried to claim. The association could still decorate the street for holidays, and Bev could still ride the cart to church when she needed it. Dale could mow his grass, the Okafors' boy could chase a ball down the sidewalk, and Patricia could live in her colonial without governing the people next door.
A subdivision is a small country, and like every country it runs on more than boundaries and rules. It runs on people deciding that the person living beside them deserves the same ordinary protections they would expect for themselves. For three years, Larksburg Commons had failed that simple test at one address. It had taken a dozen small embarrassments, one forged-looking paper, a tow truck, and a row of possessions laid out in the sun before the neighbors were willing to look again.
When I turned toward the front door, the sprinkler two houses down was still ticking. The geese on Dale's stoop faced the street. A child rode past on a bicycle and lifted one hand to wave. I waved back, then went inside, leaving my truck where it was supposed to be.
Nobody called anyone.