For half a second, I thought the woman would say she'd made a mistake. Everybody made them. At work, I made them. People who admitted errors early were usually the easiest people to trust, because you didn't have to waste time pretending nothing had happened. I would have accepted a brief apology or even an embarrassed shrug and forgotten the whole encounter before lunch.
Instead she said, "Well, you should have been holding it."
Emily glanced at me, then back at her. "I am holding it."
"That's not the point," the woman replied.
"What is the point?" I asked.
"The point is that we have rules here, and people need to follow them."
"We're following this one."
"You don't need to argue every time somebody reminds you of a rule," she snapped.
I looked at Odin, who had chosen this moment to demonstrate excellent behavior by resting his chin against Emily's shoe. "I'm not arguing about the rule. I'm telling you what is happening right in front of us."
Emily lightly touched my arm. "Time to leave."
"Agreed." I gave the woman a polite nod. "Have a good day."
We started toward the car. Behind us came a final shout.
"You need to learn to speak respectfully to board members."
I stopped. Not because the words frightened me, but because she had introduced a new piece of information. Until then, I'd assumed she was simply another resident who believed that correcting strangers was an essential part of neighborhood life. Now she was claiming the authority of the homeowners association, an organization with real power over Emily's property.
"The dog is leashed," I said, turning back. "You were wrong about that. We're done talking."
She stared at me without replying. Then, very deliberately, she looked over my shoulder toward the building and the unit numbers beside the stairwell. I noticed the movement but didn't understand its significance until much later. Emily and I drove away, Odin asleep in his travel harness before we'd reached the main road.
"You didn't have to give her the final word," Emily said after a while.
"I don't think I did."
"You know what I mean."
"She told us a leashed dog was off leash."
"And she still thinks she won that conversation."
I watched the road ahead. "It wasn't a contest."
Emily smiled faintly. "It was to her."
At her parents' house, we spent the afternoon helping with a stubborn patio door, eating a meal that involved far too much dessert, and laughing when Odin became fascinated by the reflection of a ceiling fan. By evening I'd almost forgotten the woman in the parking lot. Emily hadn't. She had lived in the complex long enough to know Linda Carver by reputation and, once I described the encounter, she supplied the name with a weary expression.
"Oh, that was Linda," she said.
"That explains her, does it?"
"She has been on the board forever. People say she catches things the management company misses."
"She caught a dog that was already leashed."
"She's very committed."
"To what?"
"That's the part nobody quite agrees on."