The President Chained The Gate In Front Of My Neighbors

Kent waited until six people had gathered around the courtyard fountain before he stopped my cart.

"Three hundred fifty dollars," he said. "Maybe that will help you remember where you live."

I had two bags of clay, clean sand, and a bucket of lime putty on the cart. None of it had spilled. The fountain behind him had no water. A mourning dove stood in its bowl as if it had come to collect rent.

"For what?" I asked.

"Commercial hauling through a residential courtyard."

At fifty, I was a broad-shouldered Cuban American woman with brown skin, gray curls cut at my chin, and a white scar through my left eyebrow.

My work shirt had a clean patch where a pocket used to be. I repaired adobe for a living. I could look at a wall and tell which patch had survived a wet summer, which had been covered with hard cement, and which would peel before Christmas.

People were harder to read. Bad patches usually admitted what they were.

Kent Drummond was a tall white American man with pink cheeks, a narrow gray mustache, and silver hair brushed into a stiff wave.

He was fifty-seven and president of the Desert Lantern townhouse association. He said both facts often, as if one explained the other.

"The workshop is behind the courtyard," I said. "The service gate is how I bring in materials."

"Your rental agreement doesn't govern my property."

"The courtyard belongs to the association."

He turned toward the neighbors.

"See what I deal with?"

The little brass bell on my cart handle gave one dull note when I shifted my grip. My father had put it there years earlier, back when we repaired garden walls together. He said people heard a bell sooner than they heard a woman saying excuse me.

Kent pointed at it.

"And that noise stops today."

I wrapped my fingers around the bell.

"Show me the rule."

He held up a plastic-covered map. A yellow line went around the courtyard. Someone had colored the service passage green and written PEDESTRIANS ONLY across it.

"Approved grounds plan," he said.

There was no date or surveyor's seal. The north arrow looked like a little kite.

"That isn't the map attached to my workshop lease."

"You rent a townhouse. You don't get a map."

I rented number eleven from Celia Ortiz. I also rented her small adobe workshop on a separate parcel beyond the north wall. My lease had two sets of terms, one for my home and one for my work.

The workshop pages had come with a folded survey. An eight-foot strip ran from its back door, down the east side of the courtyard, to the alley gate. Beside it was a reference to an access document from 1978.

I had asked Celia about that before signing.

"Materials have to reach the shop," she had told me. "That strip stays open. It was there before the townhouses."

The association had been formed in 1989. I remembered because I had written both years on the back of my rent envelope.

"I hold a right to use that passage," I told Kent. "You should check before you block it."

He gave a loud, short laugh.

"You hold a bucket. Move it."

No one laughed with him. That seemed to make him angrier.

Mavis Chen, who lived across from me, stepped closer.

"She's brought that cart through for three years."

"And now we have enforcement," Kent said.

He took a chain from a canvas bag. It looked new. He wrapped it around the service gate handles and snapped on a brass padlock.

The click sounded small for something that could stop my income.

"How am I supposed to get tomorrow's delivery in?" I asked.

"Use your front door."

"The workshop's front door opens onto a footpath with steps."

"Then choose a more suitable business."

He handed me a notice with my name written in thick black ink. It said $350, due in ten days. Below that, he had written $50 PER DAY FOR CONTINUED VIOLATION.

I took a photograph of the chain, then the notice, then his map.

"You can photograph me too," he said. "I'm not afraid of tenants."

"I need the date," I said.

I backed my cart into the shade. Beside the passage stood Kent's storage room, painted the same peach as his townhouse. Its wall had a hard gray seam under the paint. Whoever built it had pushed cement against an older adobe pier.

That seam was younger than everything around it.

I went home and opened the flat drawer beneath my kitchen table. My lease was inside a flour sack, along with my father's old brass level.

The survey unfolded across four place mats.

At the bottom, beside the recorded document number, someone had added a note in red pencil.

I had never needed to read it closely before.

It said: SOUTH CORNER MONUMENT BELOW FINISHED GRADE. DO NOT ASSUME EXISTING WALL IS BOUNDARY.