"Standards don't disappear merely because someone paints a line on the pavement."
Maria paused on the porch, a bag of oranges in her arms. She didn't say anything. But when Victoria drove away, she turned toward me with an expression I would soon learn meant she was filing a fact away for later.
"Does she always speak to you like that?" Maria asked.
"Only when she's awake."
Maria set the oranges on the kitchen counter. "You know, people sometimes mistake an association's authority to enforce rules for an unlimited right to invent them. Those aren't the same thing."
I laughed. "For somebody who claims to be bad at talking about work, you sound suspiciously comfortable with legal language."
"I've had some practice."
I didn't know then how much practice. I only knew that within three weeks, Victoria had found a new way to make our lives difficult, and the sound of my mailbox lid opening had begun to make me nervous again.
The new guest parking policy arrived on a Thursday in an envelope printed with an illustration of the Willowbrook clubhouse. It was the kind of cheerful design normally used to announce a pool reopening or holiday picnic. Inside was a two-page amendment, effective immediately, limiting guest vehicles to forty-eight hours of street parking during any thirty-day period.
An attached penalty schedule allowed daily fines of seventy-five dollars, with the association reserving the right to calculate repeated violations from the first day of an alleged infraction. I read that paragraph three times. If a visitor came for a long weekend and an inspector claimed the vehicle had spent time on the street, the financial penalties could accumulate long before the homeowner had a chance to respond.
Maria's truck had spent most of the previous weekend in my driveway. There was no question about that. But on the Saturday evening when we moved my old refrigerator into the garage, I had briefly parked the F-150 along the curb to make room for the delivery truck. The next morning there was a $225 notice under my windshield wiper.
"Three days," the notice alleged. "Guest vehicle present in violation of current community standards."
I showed Maria the paper while she was making dinner. "Apparently your truck has learned to occupy two places at once."
She turned the page over, examined the policy number, and asked, "Was this voted on?"
"The notice says the board adopted it last month."
"That's not the same as saying they followed the procedures required to change an enforceable restriction."
"So what do you suggest?"
"Read the governing documents. All of them. Not the highlights they put on the website."
I gave her a skeptical look. "That's your romantic advice for a Friday night?"
"I was going to suggest takeout, too."
We ate Thai food over a stack of printed association documents. Maria read the parking policy and asked questions that made me notice all the places it failed to explain itself.
Was driveway parking covered? Did a parked vehicle have to obstruct anything? Who recorded the date and time? What notice was required before a fine? How did residents appeal?