“You could have pretended,” I told him.
“I figured you’d know.”
“I would.”
He smiled.
“Then pretending seemed inefficient.”
I liked that answer.
He became one of our best interns.
Eventually, that became part of the story too.
Not the public version.
Mine.
The Ferrari had once attracted a young man who wanted to borrow status from it.
Later, it attracted another young man who wanted to understand the engineering inside it.
The object had not changed.
The people approaching it had.
So had I.
Two years after the vandalism, Silver Pines held another election.
Martin did not run again.
He said two years of reading HOA emails had shortened his expected lifespan.
I believed him.
Irene refused the presidency.
Everybody was relieved.
A woman named Rachel Alvarez won instead. She was an accountant, which made residents nervous until she explained during the candidate forum that her primary campaign promise was to make HOA government “as boring as humanly possible.”
She won by a landslide.
At her first meeting, she announced that nobody on the board would be referred to as a “community leader.”
“Board member is enough,” she said.
Irene whispered from behind me:
“I like her.”
So did I.
Under Rachel, the enforcement report became even simpler.
Rules.
Notices.
Appeals.
Outcomes.
Nothing about homeowner attitudes.
Nothing about cooperation rankings.
Nothing about whether someone had an expensive vehicle or an annoying personality.
The system did not care whether it liked you.
That was the point.
One Saturday morning, almost exactly three years after Chase first asked to borrow the Ferrari, I washed it in my driveway.
The garage door was open.
Completely open.
Not halfway.
Not just long enough to move the car.
Open because I wanted air moving through the garage.
I had music playing.
A bucket beside the front wheel.
The same kind of portable tire inflator Denise once photographed sat on my workbench.
I noticed it and smiled.
Irene walked past carrying pruning shears.
She stopped.
“Garage door’s been open eleven minutes.”
“Better report me.”
“I know the president.”
“So do I.”
“She hates paperwork.”
“Then I’m safe.”
Irene looked at the Ferrari.
“You know, when you first moved here, everybody thought that thing was going to be the neighborhood problem.”
“It was.”
“No.”
She shook her head.
“The car never did anything.”
Then she kept walking.
That sentence stayed with me.
The Ferrari had never been the problem.
Neither had the open garage.