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Still in Session
Episode 3 of 3 of Let the Record Show by Joan Pemberton · free to read
Mrs. Mercer’s objection killed the motion to save our duck pond, and on Wednesday night, with the paving trucks due Thursday at eight, I went and sat on the bench by the water with Arlene.
She had the cracked corn. The ducks came over in a line, the way they did for her and nobody else.
“Lenny built that,” she said, and nodded at the little wooden duck house on its post in the middle of the pond. “The summer we moved in. He swam it out there in his work pants because he didn’t own swim trunks.
“I watched him from the porch. He was fifty-one and he had never swum in anything bigger than a bathtub, and he did it because the ducks had nowhere to sit when it rained.”
She threw a handful of corn. It landed in a neat arc.
“He used to say this pond was the only part of the association that worked.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. A duck climbed onto the little house and sat there.
When I got home I took out the September minutes. I don’t know why. I suppose I wanted to read the thing that had done this, the way you look at a step you tripped on.
I read it word for word, because I wrote it word for word. Forty minutes of mailbox colors reads even longer than it sits.
The pond motion. Gus’s second. The mailbox colors. And at the very end, at eight fifteen, the last line on the page.
Well, that’s that.
I read it again. Then I got out the bylaws and turned to section six point five, which I had read the first night and thought nothing of.
The President shall declare the meeting adjourned.
Norm had never declared anything adjourned. Not in September. Not in October. Not once, if the old secretaries’ summaries were any guide, in nineteen years. He said well, that’s that, and went for the coffee.
At seven fifty Thursday morning there were fifty-seven residents on the grass by the pond, two paving trucks idling on the cul-de-sac, and a foreman with a clipboard who looked like he had not expected an audience.
Norm was there in his bathrobe. Mrs. Mercer was there with her calculator. Gus was there, upright, which was a first.
I had my steno machine on a card table. I had brought the card table.
I had thought about it all night. If I was wrong about section six point five, I would be the secretary who stopped two paving trucks with a typing machine and a technicality that did not exist, and I would be that woman at every mailbox until I died.
“Norm,” I said. “The September meeting. You never adjourned it.”
“I said that’s that.”
“The bylaws say adjourned.” I held up the page. “Which means, technically, this board has been in session for nineteen years. Nothing it did since was ever adopted. Which means we are still before adjournment. Which means anyone can still object to the pond.”
Mrs. Mercer opened her mouth.
“And I’m the secretary,” I said, “and I’m a member, and I’m doing it first.”
I put my fingers on the keys.
“Objection,” I said, and typed it, and turned the machine so the foreman could see the tape, which meant nothing to him at all.
Mrs. Mercer looked at the pond for a long time. A duck was sitting on Lenny’s house. Two more were swimming over to see whether the trucks had brought anything to eat.
“Forty-two hundred a year,” she said finally. “Fine. But I want that in the minutes. That I said fine.”
“It’s in,” I said.
The foreman asked who was going to pay for his morning. Mrs. Mercer said the president would, and made a note.
Arlene came and stood next to me. She didn’t say anything. She put her hand on my shoulder, the way she always did, and left it there.
“All right,” Norm said. He looked at fifty-seven people and two trucks and a woman in a robe crying a little into a bag of cracked corn. “Then I’d better do it right.” He looked at my machine. “Is the stenotype getting this?”
“Every word,” I said.
He cleared his throat.
“This meeting,” he said, “is adjourned.”
“Second,” Gus said.