I had met difficult people before. I had worked beside them, answered to them, investigated them, and on several unfortunate occasions had invited them into my home before learning what they were like.
But until Brenda Ashworth marched across my driveway and demanded free diesel from a pump she did not own, I had never met a person who seemed genuinely offended by the existence of the word no.
I was filling my old pickup on a clear Thursday morning when I heard the fast, precise click of expensive shoes on concrete. The nozzle was seated in the truck's tank, the meter was turning, and a soft breeze carried the familiar smell of diesel toward my workshop. Behind me, someone cleared her throat in a manner meant to sound like a summons. I finished watching the gauge before I turned around.
Brenda stood at the edge of my fueling pad with a large handbag tucked under one elbow and sunglasses pushed into her blond hair. Across the street, her white Range Rover waited with the engine running. She looked from my truck to the private pump and then at me, as if I were an employee who had somehow failed to notice the customer waiting for service.
"Fill my vehicle when you're finished, Marcus," she said. "And make it quick. I have appointments."
"Good morning to you, Brenda."
She made a small impatient gesture. "I'm serious."
"So am I. That's my fuel, and this isn't a public station."
"As president of the homeowners association, I shouldn't be paying for something that one of our residents has sitting right here. Especially when you've made such a spectacle of helping other people with it."
I looked at her car and then back at her. "You want me to give you diesel because you hold an unpaid position on a neighborhood board?"
"I want you to cooperate with community leadership."
"No."
It was not shouted. I said it at the same volume I would have used to tell a cashier I didn't need a receipt. Somehow that made it worse. Her jaw tightened, and she shifted her handbag from one arm to the other as though preparing for a speech she had already rehearsed.
"You're being deliberately hostile."
"I'm filling my truck."
"You're denying an authorized community representative access to a neighborhood resource."
"This isn't a neighborhood resource. It's my privately owned equipment on my property, and I have the permits to prove it."
She reached into her handbag for her phone. I assumed she was about to photograph the pump again, a hobby of hers over the past several weeks. Instead, she pressed a number, waited a moment, and announced in a voice designed to carry across three driveways that she needed police assistance. When the dispatcher answered, Brenda said a resident was behaving aggressively and that she felt threatened.