Anna read the draft over my shoulder. "You need to put your own number on it," she said. I hesitated because my phone was already becoming unusable. "The HOA won't put anyone through to us," she answered. "You want a mother awake at two in the morning to be guessing about the water, or calling the person responsible for it?" I added my number and the state permit reference, then printed the first stack.
Our kitchen printer was never designed to handle an emergency for an entire subdivision. It fed two pages at once, ran out of black ink halfway through the second tray, and made a squealing noise Anna had complained about for months. We drove to the all-night copy counter at a gas station twenty minutes away, where a teenage clerk helped me print the remaining notices after hearing what they were for. He did not charge for the last fifty sheets. I remember that because the kindness of someone who did not know me nearly made me cry.
We started hanging the notices at ten that night. Anna took one side of each street, and I took the other, rubber-banding pages to door handles rather than relying on mailboxes nobody would check until morning. We worked under porch lights that turned on as we approached and off as we walked away. Dogs barked. Motion sensors lit up gardens decorated with stone deer and polished gravel. Twice the sprinklers began running while we were on a lawn, a bitter reminder of how casually the system had been treated until the taps stopped.
At the Henderson house, a man answered in a bathrobe with the phone already in his hand. He looked at the flyer, then at me, then back at the flyer. "Is this you?" he demanded. "Is this the thing you did?"
I told him it was the thing I had found, and that the water needed testing before anyone used it. He asked why he should believe me when the association president said I was holding the neighborhood hostage. I told him the test results would be available through the county and the laboratory, not through anyone's opinion of my unpaid invoices.
"My wife has been filling bottles for the kids all evening," he said. "We pay our dues. We shouldn't have to live like this." I agreed with him. That surprised him enough to interrupt his anger for a moment.
Then he said, "Turn it on, Kenneth. Whatever fight you have with Diane, leave the rest of us out of it." I asked him to imagine being told his children were drinking from a pipe that might have received untreated pond water. He stared at me and shut the door.
A few streets later an older resident named Mrs. Keene took the flyer without reading it. "I'm not angry with you," she said. She stood in a cardigan beside a basket of laundry and looked exhausted.