We stayed in the garage until the light outside went soft. Tate told me he was nervous about moving into his dorm at the University of Georgia, though he had been pretending to be excited all summer. He worried that leaving would mean the house was emptier than I admitted. I told him I had spent most of my adult life teaching other people to survive hard nights, and that I would learn how to survive a quiet one without keeping him home.
He smiled, but only a little. Then he asked whether we could take the Mustang out the following morning, just the two of us. We drove north with the windows down, the V8 giving a low familiar note as it climbed a hill. At a diner outside town, Tate ordered pancakes and I ate eggs, and we talked about anything except the Lockwoods.
On the way back, I told him about the first restoration project I had attempted with his grandfather. It had been a Chevrolet pickup that never ran properly and leaked oil everywhere. Tate laughed harder than the story deserved. For half an hour it felt as if the world had left us alone.
The next notice arrived while we were unloading the grocery bags. It accused us of operating a vehicle in violation of the community's appearance standards because a photograph had captured pollen on the hood during our brief stop in the driveway. The fine was three hundred dollars. Tate stared at the screen, then looked toward the Lockwood house.
"Dad," he said, "please tell me you're done being polite."
"No," I told him. "I'm done assuming they're harmless. That's different."
I contacted a local attorney named Ruth Delgado, who specialized in property disputes and had no professional connection to my department. I took the notices, governing documents, photographs, and recorded communications to her office on a Monday afternoon. Ruth was in her early fifties and looked over her glasses at the fine for a dusty car as if the paper had insulted her personally. She spent an hour building a chronology before offering any conclusions.
"Some of these notices appear defective on their face," she said. "But I want the full declaration and every amendment before I tell you what the association can or cannot enforce."
That was an answer I trusted. Lawyers who promise victory before reviewing a file concern me as much as officers who decide what happened before interviewing the witnesses. Ruth explained that county registration and state vehicle laws were not substitutes for the governing covenants, and that certain restrictions could be enforceable if properly adopted and applied. What concerned her was the absence of consistent procedure and the apparent targeting after I declined a private sale.
She recommended a formal records request, a written challenge to the fees, and a demand that the association preserve the communications supporting the violations. She also suggested I stop voluntarily paying new charges until the review mechanism was clarified, rather than turning every notice into an automatic debit. We prepared the letters together. I paid her for the consultation with money from my own account.