Once I asked whether she would move a few feet. She told me the street was common property and that she was entitled to park wherever she wanted. I pointed out that the town maintained the street, not the association, and suggested she leave enough room for emergency access. She smiled as though the request had confirmed something she already believed about my temperament.
"Sterling, you do seem to find a problem with everything," she said.
"Only when something is a problem," I answered.
The next afternoon, she sent me a message warning against hostile interactions with board officers. I forwarded it to the association's official email and requested that future communications be limited to notices and hearing schedules. Hadley replied from her personal account within seven minutes, asking whether I was trying to intimidate her by putting everything in writing. I did not answer that question.
What made the weeks difficult was not the money, though the fines were real money. It was the way the dispute colonized my evenings. I would be reading a briefing about a traffic-fatality investigation and notice myself wondering whether someone had approached the garage while I was at work. I would wake before dawn and check the cameras instead of going straight to the coffeemaker. I had moved to Briarwood Glen for peace, and a stranger who wanted my wife's car had made the house feel watched.
One Friday I found Tate sitting in the garage with the driver's door open. He had come home from his shift at Publix and was staring at the brass plaque on the glove box. He looked up when I entered and tried to make his face casual, but I knew him too well. I asked whether something had happened at the pool.
He told me a man named Graham Phelps, one of Whit's golf friends, had approached him near the snack bar. Graham had said the neighborhood was worried about his father and that perhaps Tate could help an old man recognize when it was time to let go of the past. Three teenagers heard it. Bryson stood nearby and laughed without bothering to pretend the conversation concerned him.
"I wanted to hit him," Tate said. "I really did."
"But you didn't."
"No. I told him Mom was the best person I'd ever known, and he didn't get to use her as a sales pitch."
I sat beside him on the rolling shop stool. I had given hundreds of parents talks about young men and impulse control, but suddenly I could not think of a single useful sentence. Marguerite had been the one who knew what to say when Tate was angry. She could look beneath the anger and find the place where he was frightened.
"You're allowed to be angry," I said finally. "You're not allowed to let somebody else decide who you become because of it."
He turned the brass plaque back and forth with his thumb. "They don't even know her."
"No," I said. "They don't."