My husband walked down the center aisle of the community room with a three ring binder under one arm and a manila folder in the other hand, and I felt every head in the room turn. Lorraine sat behind the long table in her navy blazer, gavel resting in her palm, with the pleasant smile of a woman who expects no resistance. Dave stopped at the microphone and said, “Madam President, I would like to speak under open forum.”
She tried to table it. She said open forum was reserved for the end of the agenda. Dave quietly opened the bylaws to page nine and read that any resident could address the board at any annual meeting for up to ten minutes on a matter of association business. A neighbor in the front row, a retired judge named Mr. Okafor, said loudly, “He is correct.” The smile of Lorraine thinned. She set down the gavel. “Ten minutes,” she said.
Dave had spent a month doing something I had not known was possible: reading everything. He had requested the violation records of the association under the right of owners to inspect, and the board, bound by the state statute, had produced them. He opened the folder and held up a spreadsheet he had built himself. In eighteen months the board had issued 143 notices. Of those, forty one had gone to our address. The other 102 had been spread among the remaining 311 homes.
A murmur ran through the room. He went on, calm as a man reading a weather report. The five violations he had counted against our house in three months, he said, carried a total of $2,400 in fines. The same conduct, a trash bin left at the curb for a short time, grass an inch tall, a seasonal wreath, had gone unreported at every other home on the street. He had walked the neighborhood with a camera and photographed forty two similar cases. He passed a printed page to the table. “No notices were sent,” he said.
Rules are only fair when they are applied to everyone alike, and no gavel can make favoritism look like order.
Then he turned to the bylaws. Section 3.9, he read, required any board member with a family or financial relationship to an owner to recuse herself from enforcement decisions concerning that owner. Section 7.4 required uniform enforcement of the covenants, and stated that a fine imposed in a selective manner was voidable at the request of the owner. He looked up. “The president of this board is my mother. She voted on every one of these notices. She did not recuse herself once.”
Mr. Okafor asked to speak. He said, in the careful voice of a man who had spent forty years on the bench, that the board had a legal duty to review the matter at once. A second neighbor seconded. Then a third, a young woman with a stroller, stood and said she had received a notice in March and had felt targeted too, and that she had since learned the sender was Lorraine. Several hands went up. It turned out we were not the only family who had crossed her.
The vote was held on the spot, after the board attorney, a nervous young man in a gray suit, confirmed in a whisper that Dave was right. All 2,400 dollars in fines against our home were voided, and refunded, by a vote of seven to nothing, with Lorraine abstaining. A motion followed to adopt a written conflict of interest policy. A second created a review committee of three owners to examine every notice from the past two years. A third, put forward by Mr. Okafor, asked the president to step down from enforcement matters.
Lorraine sat still through all of it. I watched her face, and I will tell you the truth: I felt no triumph. She looked small behind that long table, a woman of seventy two who had come to Arizona to be near her family and who had instead spent two years nursing a grievance. When the meeting ended, she gathered her papers slowly. She did not speak to us. She walked out through the side door, and I saw her stop in the hallway and lean against the wall with her eyes closed.
Dave found her there. I stayed back at the end of the corridor and did not hear what he said. I saw him put his hand on her shoulder. I saw her shake her head and then, after a moment, nod. They stood there a long time. When he came back he told me only that his mother had said she was ashamed, and that she wanted to resign from the board, and that she had asked him if she was still welcome at our table. He had said that she was, if she wanted to be.
She resigned the next morning. The board elected Mr. Okafor president, and the first thing he did was send a note to every owner with a plain explanation of what had happened and an apology. The review committee found thirty one other fines that should be voided, and the money went back in checks, with a handwritten line from the new president on each. Our trash bin sits at the curb now, on Tuesdays, for as long as it needs to. Nobody counts the minutes.
On Sunday afternoons Lorraine comes for lunch. She brings a lemon cake from a bakery and sits at our patio table in a floppy hat. She asked Dave last week if she might help at the community garden, a project the new board started on the empty lot at the end of the street. He said she would be wonderful at it. She is already organizing the volunteers, with a clipboard, and this time, when she says a rule, everyone smiles.