The work was still in me. When I entered an unfamiliar building, I found the nearest exits without meaning to, then glanced at the sprinkler heads and wondered whether the water supply behind them was as good as the paint on the pipes. When I drove past a warehouse, I noticed whether the pump house had a separate power source. When I heard an engine struggling to draft from a pond, I listened to the change in pitch before I looked at the gauges. Those habits had kept crews safe, and they were harder to set aside than a toolbox.
Cedar Hollow Estates was supposed to be where I set them aside. There were ninety houses spread across four curving streets, modest enough to be called houses rather than estates unless somebody was trying to sell one. The entrance had a stone marker and a small island of ornamental grass, with a row of mailboxes farther up the road and a narrow road winding toward the hills. Nobody checked identification at the entrance, and the most excitement we usually had was a lost delivery truck turning around in somebody's driveway.
I bought my place six years earlier because the lot was deeper than most and backed up against a low, dry hillside. From the rear step I could see live oaks, pale rock, scrub, and enough sky to make the nights feel larger than they had when I lived near the city. I had planted two rows of oaks my second year there, not because anyone demanded screening, but because I liked the way trees made a property look as though it intended to stay. Every autumn I cleaned the gutters, trimmed back growth around the shed, and paid the homeowners association dues on the first of the month.
There was a reason I never ran for the board. I had sat through enough safety committees to recognize the difference between people working together and people collecting titles. At my last major industrial job, a plant manager had argued for twenty minutes over the appearance of a fire pump enclosure before admitting that he had never read the test report. I did not care to bring that sort of conversation home with me. At Cedar Hollow, I attended the annual meeting, voted on the budget when I remembered, and went back to my own life.
I liked my neighbors without being especially close to them. Elliot Vance lived two houses down and one lot back, a sixty-three-year-old retired accountant who had once lent me a ladder without asking why mine was not tall enough. Pat Dunleavy on the south curve kept a flower bed so orderly that I sometimes suspected the plants had signed an agreement. Grant Ellison, a board member, waved when we passed in our trucks and always looked as though he was on his way to a meeting he would rather miss.