HOA Payback

I'm 34 years old and I spend my weekends driving around a cul-de-sac taking notes on people's hedges. That's where this starts, so you know what kind of story you're getting.

My name is Anders. I'm a park ranger the rest of the week, which mostly means picking up trash and yelling at guys with off-leash dogs. The HOA thing started as a side gig. My boss Brad asked me about it in the truck one Tuesday.

"You need the money or what?" he asked, steering with one wrist.

"Not really. I need the address list," I said.

"What do you mean, the address list?"

"There's a woman on Willow Crescent. 114. Lisa Goodwin. She used to be my wife, more or less. She lives there with the guy she was seeing behind my back, and I want to know things about her life. Inspections get me up her driveway twice a month. You see how that works."

Brad was quiet for a second. Then he laughed, this short bark like he couldn't hold it in.

"So you want to get paid to be a creep."

"Basically, yeah."

"That's honest, at least. Fine. You're hired. But you do the actual work too. I'm not carrying a deadweight grudge around the neighborhood."

"I do real work. Ask anybody."

"Nobody's asking anybody," he said. But he was grinning.

* * *

So that was the arrangement. Brad's on the HOA board, and the board hires an inspector every summer to walk the streets and write up violations. Tall grass, trash cans left out, paint peeling, whatever. It pays decent for a few hours a week. And it puts me about forty feet from Lisa's mailbox on a regular schedule.

The first two Saturdays were useless. We did the houses at the top of the crescent, the ones near the entrance, and I barely thought about her at all. That's the part nobody tells you about revenge. It gets boring fast. You're standing in a stranger's yard writing down that their fence has a warped plank and you think, what am I even doing here.

Brad noticed it too, I think. He's 38, older than me, and he's got this way of watching people sideways while pretending to look at paperwork.

"You're doing it again," he said on the third Saturday.

"Doing what?"

"Staring at 114 like it owes you money."

"It does owe me money. Half a mortgage."

"Well, we're not on 114 today. We're on 107, and 107 has a lawn mower in their driveway they're going to claim is broken. So look at the lawn mower."

I looked at the lawn mower. It was rusted through on one side. I wrote it down.

We got through three houses that morning, which was good pace. 101 had a dead bush they'd promised to replace since spring. 107 was the mower thing. 109 had a kid's bike left in the front yard, which technically wasn't a violation but Brad said write it up anyway and I said that's abuse of power and he said welcome to the board.

"You know what I don't get," he said as we got back in his truck. He left it idling, which he always does, some habit from his old job. "What's the actual plan? You collect dirt on Lisa for a season. Then what?"

"I don't know. Then she gets fined, I guess. Then it keeps happening."

"And that makes you feel better?"

"I haven't gotten there yet. I'll report back."

"That's not an answer, Anders."

"It's the only answer I've got. She broke six years of my life in about six weeks. I don't have a plan. I have a direction."

Brad put the truck in gear and we rolled down the crescent toward his place. His house is at the bottom of the loop, the last one, back fence against the greenbelt. I'd never actually been inside. We'd always met at the office or the diner on Route 9.

"Iceberg lettuce at my house, I warn you now," he said. "If you're staying for lunch. And my garage is a disaster, so don't judge me."

"I judge everyone. It's in the job description."

"Then write me up, inspector."

He pulled into the driveway and hit the clicker on the visor. Nothing happened. He hit it again. Still nothing. He made this sound, kind of a low grunt, a man who's been through this before.

"Hang on. It sticks. The sensor gets cranky when it's humid out."

He got out and went to the wall panel by the garage door, the little button inside the frame. I heard the motor catch and the door started to rise, got about three feet up, and then it jolted and stopped and made a horrible grinding noise. Then a clunk. Then nothing at all.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Brad said.

I got out of the truck and came around. The door was stuck half up, tilted a little to one side. You could see under it, into the dark of the garage. There was a push mower in there with the handle taped up, a workbench, a wall of rakes and shovels hanging off nails.

"Can we lift it?" I asked.

"Manually? It's off the track now. If I pull it the springs are shot and it comes down on us. No."

"So we're locked out."

"We're locked out." He stood there with his hands on his hips, looking at the gap under the door like it had personally insulted him. "And my house keys are inside. On the counter. I watched myself set them down this morning and thought, Brad, take the spare. And I didn't take the spare."

"Where's the spare?"

"In a drawer. Inside."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. He turned around and glared at me, but he was already fighting a smile.

"Go ahead. Get it out of your system."

"That's the funniest thing I've seen all summer. You inspect other people's houses for a living and you're locked out of your own."

"I inspect other people's houses for a living, yes. Thank you."

"So what do we do? Call a locksmith?"

"Yeah, yeah, hold on." He pulled out his phone and dialed, and I watched his face while he waited. He paced a little on the driveway. "Hey, it's Brad, Brad Hollis, 12 Willow Crescent, the cul-de-sac off Mill Road. Yeah. Garage door's jammed half open and my keys are inside. No, I can't get in through the garage, the springs are done. How long? Seriously? Okay. Okay, fine, three o'clock works. Yeah, that's fine."

He hung up and put the phone in his pocket.

"Three hours?"

"Three hours. The guy said it could be sooner if a job cancels, but plan on three."

"It's eleven now!"

"I can count, Anders."

"So we sit here for three hours."

"We could go somewhere. There's the diner."

"It's your house, man. I'm not making you leave your own driveway."

"It's fine. Really. I've got beer in a cooler in the truck bed from the lake last weekend. We've got folding chairs in the bed too. It's not a prison sentence. We'll sit in the driveway like a couple of old guys and wait for the locksmith."

I looked at the truck. There was, in fact, a cooler strapped down in the bed, and two canvas chairs folded up next to it.

"You've got your whole life back there."

"I tailgate alone a lot. Don't read into it."

"I'm not reading into anything."

"Good. Hand me a chair then."

I got the chairs out and we set them up on the driveway in the shade of the garage, facing the stuck door like it was a movie screen. He popped two beers and handed me one. The can was cold and sweating. Somewhere a couple houses up, a sprinkler was ticking back and forth.

"So," Brad said. "Three hours. No paperwork, no houses to inspect. Talk to me about the plan again."

"There's no plan, I told you!"

"There's a direction. I want to hear the direction."

I took a drink and looked down the crescent. From Brad's driveway you could see all the way around the loop, and 114 sat right there at the curve, blue door, tidy hedges. She kept the hedges trimmed. She always did.

"Fine," I said. "The direction is this. She ruined my life and I wanted to stand in her driveway and watch it happen. That's it. There is the whole ugly truth of it. I wanted to be close while her life goes fine, because mine doesn't."

Brad nodded slowly. He didn't say anything for a second.

"That's the first honest thing you've said since I hired you."

"Don't get used to it."

"Too late. Now I like you, and that's your fault."

He leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out and it was quiet except for the sprinkler and the truck idling. And I sat there thinking that being stuck in his driveway was, weirdly, better than any morning I'd had in months. I didn't say that part out loud.

We sat there through two more beers. At some point Brad got up and dragged the cooler over next to his chair instead of walking to the truck every time. The sprinkler quit. A neighbor's dog came out, looked at us, and went back in.

"So I'm going to say a thing," Brad said. "And you're going to want to interrupt me, and I need you to not do that."

"Okay."

"I know Lisa. Not just the address you gave me. She's on the board's complaint file twice a year, her and the guy she moved in with. Fence disputes. Trash