A few days later Grant knocked on my front door carrying an envelope. He was not wearing his usual relaxed expression, and he asked whether we could talk away from the street. I invited him onto the back patio, where the tank stood beyond the oaks and a small lizard watched us from the brick edging. Grant sat with his hands folded and spent a long minute looking toward the hills.
He told me he had asked during the last board discussion whether the association's attorney had approved the removal estimate. Celeste had said an attorney would only slow the process down and increase costs. Grant asked a second time about the authority for physical removal, and another director had suggested that the president was handling the details. Grant had pressed for a vote and been told the matter was already within the president's enforcement responsibilities.
"Did the board vote?" I asked.
"Not that I can find in the minutes," he said. "I don't like that answer any more than you do."
I thanked him for being willing to say it. He looked relieved for a moment, then admitted something that seemed to trouble him more. The board had been relying on Celeste to decide which matters needed legal review, and he could not remember when they had last independently checked one of her recommendations. He had believed her because she usually sounded certain and because the cost of questioning her was another unpleasant evening.
"That's what I'm trying to get past," he said. "The habit of letting one person be the whole board."
I asked whether he had told the other directors what he had found. He said he would, and I believed him, though I did not ask him to become my advocate. A board member who changes his mind only because a neighbor asks him to is not an improvement over one who votes out of habit. What I needed from Grant was the same thing I wanted from Celeste: read the documents and exercise independent judgment.
Before leaving, Grant paused at the back gate and examined the fire-department connection. He ran one finger along the label and asked whether it had been reviewed by the district. I showed him the correspondence and explained what five thousand gallons could and could not do. He looked up at the hills, now almost completely brown, and said he hoped the water would never be necessary.
"So do I," I answered. "I'd call that a successful investment."
Elliot came by the next evening with a manila folder under his arm and an excuse about his sprinkler timer. He was the sort of neighbor who needed a practical reason for appearing at somebody's door, and I suspected he would have invented an irrigation problem even if his lawn had been underwater. We stood in the driveway and talked about the weather for two minutes before he admitted he had found something in his old association newsletters. He handed me a paper copy dated four autumns earlier.