The Cedarbrook Estates HOA held new board elections 6 weeks after the forum. Randolph was elected president by a margin that made the old elections look embarrassing, 38 out of 41 votes cast. Patricia became treasurer. Theo, who had never wanted to be on any board ever, reluctantly agreed to serve as a non-officer community liaison, which mostly meant he walked the neighborhood every morning like he always had, but now people stopped him to talk about drainage and property maintenance with an air of genuine collaboration. The reserve fund restitution, $171,800, paid in a court-supervised structured arrangement from Delores' assets and ultimately the foreclosure proceeds, was deposited back into a new transparently managed HOA account.
Every homeowner received a financial statement. Every transaction was documented in board minutes. Randolph hired a professional HOA management company to handle the accounting with full quarterly audits. The community center got repainted. The entrance road got its repaving.
Dusty the plumber got paid with interest and signed a new maintenance contract. Here's what I found when it was all over going through the papers one last time before I finally recycled that two-inch folder labeled Delores. The entire fight had cost me $4,200 in direct legal fees above what insurance covered. The counter claim judgment gave me back $23,400. Net positive, $19,200.
I used it to fully fund a college scholarship in Margaret's name, the retired school teacher who'd been driven off the board over a wind chime, who showed up in a yellow cardigan, who started the applause. The Margaret Elaine Hooper Community Scholarship. First award went to a kid from Cedarbrook Estates, 18 years old, heading to study civil engineering. He wanted to design bridges. Theo cried at the announcement dinner.
He denies this. Preston, for what it's worth, reached out to me once. A text, brief and slightly awkward, to say he was sorry about the wall. Not about the lawsuit notably, just the wall. I wrote back, "Appreciated.
Stay off my street at 34 mph." He didn't respond. That's fine. Some lessons take longer. As for me, the wall still stands.
It'll outlast all of us. The tulips came back a second year, red and yellow, same as before. Sometimes I have my coffee outside in the morning and just look at the thing. $2,000 of materials, four weekends of work, one Jeep through the middle of it, and three years of everything else. It held.