Celeste Whitmore was different. She had been association president longer than I had lived there, and many people genuinely credited her with keeping the place attractive. She organized the holiday lights, called landscaping companies when crews failed to show, and could quote a color restriction from memory. She had also developed the unfortunate conviction that being responsible for maintaining a neighborhood entitled her to decide what kind of people belonged in it.
I learned that about her gradually. A delivery driver told me she had complained about his truck because its lettering was visible from the street for twenty minutes. A family on Bramble Court received repeated messages about the color of their children's bicycles even though the bicycles were kept behind the house. More than one resident laughed when they described the way Celeste inspected a driveway, but their laughter had a wary edge. Nobody seemed interested in finding out what happened if they told her plainly that she was wrong.
I did not think I would ever be the one to find out. My own place was tidy, the paint was an approved color, and I had no plans to build an extension or park a boat in the road. If a board member had asked me to move the recycling bins out of sight, I would probably have done it. Keeping peace is easy when the request is reasonable.
Then the spring rains failed. March brought little more than a few brief showers, and April's storms moved north of us without dropping enough water to wet the roots. By early June the creek behind the county service lane had shrunk to isolated pools, then to a ribbon of mud, and finally to a cracked channel. The dry grass on the slopes went straw-colored a month early.
I watched the transformation from my back step. Along the upper hill, brush that should have held at least some green through summer stood dull and brittle, the stems knocking together in the afternoon wind. A fire that started out there would not need to be large to become dangerous. It would need only dry fuel, wind, and a bad half hour at the wrong place.
My father had once told me that the frightening thing about a mechanical failure was how ordinary every minute felt before it happened. He spent most of his life maintaining municipal pumps, going out at dawn when somebody called to say the pressure was low. He taught me that people pay attention to water only when it stops arriving. As a boy, I thought he was talking about household faucets; after twenty-two years around industrial systems, I knew how much more he meant.