Chapter 5
Story: The Block Party President Mocked His Bent Spade — Then the Tax Notice on His Dashboard Read a Name
The vote was anticlimactic in the way that matters. Junelle called it, her voice thin, because she had to call something, and the board secretary read it the way you read a thing you already know will pass. The association voted to retain a landscaping service for "common area maintenance" — a watered-down version of the motion she'd written, stripped of the clause that would have barred "informal volunteers."
It passed, of course. It always passed.
But it passed with thirty-seven yeses and twelve abstentions, and the twelve abstentions were the people who had heard Hobie speak, and heard Marisol push, and heard Cyrus lay the paper flat on the table. Twelve people who had never once thought to ask who owned the ground they stood on, and who couldn't un-hear the answer.
Junelle stayed after the meeting, folding chairs alone while the neighbors drifted home, and nobody offered to help. She did the folding the way she did everything: efficiently, loudly, leaving the last chair for the stack, and then she stood at the end of the driveway with her clipboard and looked at the white house.
Cyrus was in the flower bed along the fence, on his knees, pulling weeds. He didn't look up when she approached. He kept pulling, tossing the weeds into a bucket with a wet sound.
"Vote passed," Junelle said. "The association is going to hire a service."
Cyrus pulled a dandelion by the root and shook the dirt off it. "Okay."
"Starting after Labor Day."
"Okay."
"So the work you've been doing here—"
"Is mine," Cyrus said, and he looked up at her, and his voice was not loud but it was final. "The hedge is mine. The lawn is mine. The flower bed is mine. My uncle dug this bed with that shovel you laughed at, and he planted these marigolds, and they come up every year whether the association hires a service or not. You can hire a hundred services. You can't hire anyone who knows this land the way I do, because I've been walking it since I was a boy."
Junelle's clipboard hanging at her side. The sun was going down, the street lights flickering on.
"I didn't know," she said, and the words came out small, hollow. It was the first time in nine years anyone had heard her say that sentence.
"I know," Cyrus said. "You never asked."
He went back to pulling weeds. Junelle stood there for a long moment, and then she turned and carried the last chair into her garage and didn't come back out.
Marisol watched from her porch, a cup of tea in her hand going cold. She'd helped stack the first eleven chairs, then stopped, letting Junelle finish alone, because some things you have to do with your own hands before you understand what you carried.
Across the street, Hobie Calder rocked in the dark, his hearing aid off, watching the corner lot where the flower bed glowed faintly where the marigolds reflected the porch light — the porch light Cyrus had installed himself, the month after his uncle died, so the house wouldn't sit dark.
The lot, it turned out, had always been in good hands. The hands had just never been visible.
But there was one thing nobody knew yet. Not Marisol, not Hobie, not Junelle, not the twelve people who'd abstained. One thing that sat in the glove box of the pickup, in an envelope with a postmark from two months ago, that Cyrus had opened and read twice and then put away.
It was a letter from a law firm in Cleveland. A firm that had been hired by the executor of his uncle's estate — a city official named Delia Marsh — to look into the recently discovered fact that the corner lot at 118 Meadow Row might not be the only thing Raúl Alvarado had owned.
The letter said a surveyor would be contacting him in September about the parcel abutting the lot to the rear — the creek strip, half a mile long, that had been in the Alvarado family for three generations and had been improperly included in the estate inventory when his uncle's will was probated.
It had been Cypress Creek's mistake, not his uncle's. A boundary line read wrong, a clerk's error, thirty years un-noticed.
But now it was Cyrus's.
And Junelle Pyke wasn't the only one on Meadow Row who had been building her house, her patio, her deck — her swimming pool, for God's sake — on land she didn't own.
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