The House I Bought Back
The letters got angrier for about four months. The attorney sent one. I wrote back a single sentence saying I was aware of the fine, that I intended to continue paying it, and that the ramp was not coming down, and I attached a photocopy of the April 2019 photograph of Doug at the top of it.
They stopped writing after that.
In February the association held its annual meeting. I did not go. I have never been to one and I am not going to.
Four people from Hollow Creek Court have knocked on my door since the ramp went back up, and all four of them asked about it, and I told all four of them the truth, start to finish, and showed them the folder.
The first one was a woman named Glenda who lives three doors down, and she is the reason I know the rest of it happened.
She came up on a Saturday in November with a loaf of banana bread, which I understood was a pretext, and she stood on the new ramp instead of the steps, which I noticed. She said she had been wondering about it. She said she remembered when there was one here before.
I asked her if she wanted to come in, and she did, and I put the folder on the kitchen table and opened it to the first letter and let her read it in order.
It took her a long time. She is about sixty and she reads with her finger.
About twenty minutes in she stopped and said, “I was on the committee.”
She had been on the architectural review committee in 2019. Three people. She was one of the three votes that denied Doug’s variance.
And she told me what the request looked like from her side of the table, which I had never once considered and which I think about now more than I think about Bev Rowan.
She said it came to them as a line item. Number four of seven, on a single sheet, at a meeting in a clubhouse that lasted forty minutes. She said it read something like “unapproved ramp structure, front elevation, 14 Hollow Creek,” and that Bev presented it and said the homeowner had declined to submit plans in advance, and that the committee had denied similar modifications twice before and needed to be consistent.
She said nobody in that room said the word wheelchair.
She said she did not know Doug Mabry was sick. She said she knew the Mabrys to wave at. She said if anybody had put it to her as a dying man and a ramp she would have voted the other way in a heartbeat and so would the third person on that committee, whose name I am not going to put in this.