She tossed her hair.
“Evan, sweetie, these things happen at community events. It was an unauthorized decoration anyway. I warned you about modifications to common amenities.”
“You warned me about what?”
“We can talk about this at the next board meeting, honey. You’re embarrassing yourself in front of guests.”
That was when I walked away.
Because if I had stayed, I would have said or done something Mary Ann would not have approved of.
Pete followed me.
We didn’t speak until we were back inside my kitchen.
I sat at the table with both hands flat against the wood, breathing the way you breathe when you are trying not to cry in front of another man.
“Brother,” Pete said, “you’ve been patient.”
He waited.
“Been patient real long. But patience has a job, and patience’s job is done.”
“Pete, I want that fountain back.”
“We’ll get it back. Every piece.”
The next morning at 5:30, I waded into the pool in my swim trunks.
The water was still cloudy from the night before.
Beer.
Chlorine.
Whatever people drop into pools when they believe nobody will have to clean up after them.
I found the bronze sea turtle at the bottom of the deep end.
I lifted it in both hands and carried it up the steps.
It weighed thirty-one pounds.
The initial plate was bent but intact.
MBB.
Still legible.
Still hers.
I sat on the travertine for a long time.
The sun came up pale orange over the Gulf.
A great blue heron landed on the far side of the fountain, folded its wings, and stared at me for a while.
Then it flew away.
I wrapped the bronze fragment in a beach towel that had belonged to Mary Ann.
Then I carried it inside and set it on the workbench in my garage.
I stood there in wet trunks, staring at the same bench where I had built the fountain in the first place.
The bench where I had once pressed her initials into the bronze one letter at a time while a Willie Nelson song played on the radio.
Then I dried off, changed clothes, sat down at my laptop, and opened a new folder.
PROCEDURAL.
Linda had just given me the one thing I needed most.
A line that had been crossed visibly, provably, and in front of more than forty witnesses at a commercial event she had organized on property she did not own.
The emotional dam broke.
What came through it was not anger.
It was architecture.
Warren Tanner called three days later.
He had put his best paralegal on the plat records.
She found something nobody in the neighborhood had ever bothered to investigate.
When the original developer, Coastal Capital Estates, filed the 1998 subdivision map, it had platted the pool parcel, Lot 7A, as a private recreational easement appurtenant to my home lot.
Meaning the pool had specifically been attached to the owner of my house.
Not the HOA.
Not the common area.