14. Everett
EVERETT
She’s been chewing her thumbnail for the past five minutes, sitting in the passenger seat of my truck. I’m driving because after the stick shift situation, there’s no damn way I’m letting her behind the wheel. She’s staring out the windshield like the community center parking lot is a war zone.
“You’re going to draw blood,” I murmur as I pull into a spot.
“I’m coping,” she mutters back, staring at her thumb and sighing. “What if this doesn’t work?”
“It’s going to work.”
“You keep saying that, but you won’t tell me what ‘it’ is,” she points out, turning my way. “You just keep saying ‘trust me’ like that’s a plan. That’s not a plan.”
“Sure, it is.”
“A plan has bullet points.”
“My plan has bullet points.”
“Name one.”
“Walk inside.”
She presses her forehead against the window and makes a sound somewhere between a groan and a scream. “I’m going to throw up.”
“Could you please not until we’re out of the truck?”
She’s wearing her nice jeans and a sweater without a chicken on it, which tells me she’s taking this seriously.
Her glasses are straight, and her hair is pulled back tight.
She looks like she’s about to defend a thesis, instead of fight a neighborhood board.
“When we’re in there,” I murmur as I reach out to cover her knee with one hand. “I need you to do one thing.”
“What?”
“Don’t freak out.”
“That is the least helpful thing anyone has ever said to me,” she groans. “And my grandmother once told me to ‘just relax’ while parallel parking before she pulled a flask out of her purse.”
She would do that, too. “It’s the only advice I’ve got. Are you ready?”
“Absolutely not.”
That sounds about right.
The community center is one of those low brick buildings every neighborhood has, with fluorescent lighting and linoleum floors that probably look dirty no matter how many times they get mopped.
The meeting room is in the back, through a set of double doors with a laminated sign taped to the front that reads CARDINAL OAKS HOA—BOARD MEETING 6:00 PM.
It’s 5:58. I pull one of the doors open, and Isla walks in ahead of me.
Then she stops. Because the room is packed.
It’s not just the board either. They’re sitting up front—I recognize Christine from Isla’s living room, and her husband sitting next to her.
But in front of them, filling up the metal folding chairs in messy rows, is what looks like most of my football team and the cheerleaders, and anybody else who got the message and decided to show up.
They’re all in white T-shirts. That was one of the girls’ ideas.
All of them have stuff drawn on them in Sharpie.
The artwork ranges from halfway decent to genuinely terrible.
Tyler’s chicken looks more like a dinosaur.
Sean’s says SAVE THE CHICKENS across the front in block letters that go slightly uphill.
Marcus drew an egg and wrote “PROTECT THIS” underneath it.
The girls are holding signs over their heads with similar messages written across the front.
Isla turns around to look at me. Her mouth is open. She’s not blinking. “What the hell is this?”
“I told you I had a plan.” Her mouth moves, but nothing comes out, so I explain, “I asked them. They said yes.”
That’s the short version. The longer version involves the group text I sent at two a.m. and the surprising number of guys who responded within minutes. By now, they all know about Isla’s chickens, thanks to the way she showed off pictures at the party.
On top of that, it turns out everybody hates an HOA. It’s one of the few things that unites all people, regardless of background, personality, or position on the team.
“Hey, Pickel.” Tyler gives her a nod, all casual-like. “Went around the neighborhood today. Got something for you.”
He holds up a folder with a stack of papers inside. Fifty-six signatures from residents of Cardinal Oaks, collected door to door this afternoon by a rotating crew of football players who are, as it turns out, very persuasive when they show up on your porch and politely ask you to sign something.
“It’s a petition,” I explain to Isla, whose mouth is still hanging open. “Your neighbors signed it. They want the chickens to stay, and they think the board’s been out of line with all the violations and threats.”
“The Wagners were first,” Tyler adds. “The couple next door to you? They said Cardigan comes to the fence every morning, and they feed her through the slats. They’ve been doing it for, like, a year now. They were pissed as hell when they found out the board was trying to get rid of her.”
She presses her lips together while her eyes fill up. Her dimples are showing even though she’s not smiling. I have to look away for a second before I do something stupid like kiss her in front of my entire team.
Meanwhile, Christine watches all of this unfold from her spot at the table. Her expression hasn’t changed, but I can see what’s happening behind her eyes. She’s counting bodies. Counting shirts. She’s trying to figure out how the meeting she planned turned into something very different.
Her husband leans over and whispers something, which she ignores. “This is a board meeting,” Christine announces, raising her voice until it cuts through the noise. “Not a rally. I’m going to have to ask anyone who isn’t a resident of Cardinal Oaks to—”
“It’s a public meeting,” Tyler calls out. “Community center. Open meeting. We checked.”
I didn’t tell him to check that. He did it on his own. I’m either impressed or surprised Tyler has a secret passion for municipal governance. Either way, it works. Christine doesn’t push it.
That’s when the door opens behind us.
A woman with a camera on one shoulder walks in, followed by a guy carrying a microphone.
He’s got the kind of hair and smile that says local news.
I recognize him from a segment I watched on YouTube last night about a dog rescue that went viral.
I called the station this morning and told them there’s a story here about an eighteen-year-old college student being harassed by her HOA over the pet chickens she’s had since she was fifteen.
I told them about the petition we were getting together, and the football team showing up in solidarity.
The producer I talked to said they’d send someone, but I wasn’t sure they’d actually come.
They came.
“Hi, I’m David Roberts, Channel 7,” the reporter announces as he scans the room. “Covering HOA disputes in the area. Hoping to sit in and capture some of the discussion, if that’s all right.”
Christine stares at the camera the way you’d stare at a wasp that just flew into your car.
Before she can say a word, Isla’s grandmother materializes from somewhere in the back of the room.
I didn’t see her come in, but she’s here, wearing a leopard-print blouse and pants that probably aren’t leather but look like they want to be.
She’s already moving toward the reporter with her hand extended, and a smile that can only mean trouble.
“You must be the TV man,” she purrs, holding his hand a little too long after shaking it. “Gretchen Pickel. I’m the grandmother. You know, I’ve always thought I’d photograph well. My husband used to say I had a face for Hollywood.”
“That was... very kind of him,” David manages.
“He was a kind man,” she replies. “Very tall. You’re tall, too. Are you single? Not that it’s relevant to the story, but I’m curious.”
“Grandma,” Isla hisses from next to me.
“I’m networking,” Grandma hisses back.
I put my hand on the small of Isla’s back and guide her toward a chair, because if I let her stand here and watch her grandma hit on the reporter another minute, she’s either going to explode or pass out. Neither of those options helps us right now.
We sit. The camera is set up in the corner.
David takes a seat off to the side with a notepad.
Christine looks down at her clipboard, then at the camera, then at the room full of football players and cheerleaders.
I’ve spent my whole life reading people’s faces for signs of what they’re about to do, and what I see on Christine’s right now is a woman realizing she’s outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and on camera.
“Mrs. Jones,” David calls out, “can you walk us through the board’s position? Our viewers would love to understand the issue.”
She looks at the microphone. Looks at the camera. She looks at the signatures in the folder, which Tyler left on the table. She looks at her husband, who gives her a look back that pretty clearly says please, for the love of God, let this go.
“The board has been reviewing this matter,” she says slowly. “In light of the community feedback we’ve received, we’ve decided to table the issue.”
“Table it?” Isla leans forward next to me. “What does that mean?”
Christine’s jaw works. “It means we’re dropping it. The complaints, the notices, the enforcement actions. All of it.” She looks and sounds as if she just swallowed something extremely bitter, which I guess she has in a way.
The room reacts. Not in some big, dramatic movie way. Nobody stands up and slow-claps or anything like that. But there’s a ripple of noise. Chairs creaking, a few of the guys clapping each other on the shoulder. From the back, Grandma shouts, “Well, it’s about damn time.”
Isla doesn’t make any noise at all. She sits next to me with her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead before she turns to look up at me. Her eyes are full of tears when she whispers, “You did this.”
“We did this.”
“You brought the whole team.”
“They wanted to come.”
She leans into me, presses her face against my shoulder, and I put an arm around her because I don’t give a shit who’s watching. None of it matters. Not even when Grandma asks David Roberts for his business card.
Christine and her husband leave first. She doesn’t look at anyone on the way out, and he walks fast enough that she has to speed up to keep pace with him.
The rest of the board follows. The guys start filtering out in twos and threes, slapping my shoulder on the way past, with a couple of them stopping to tell Isla they’re glad it worked out.
David does a brief interview with Isla in the hallway. She’s nervous, but she talks about the chickens with the kind of quiet fierceness she gets, the thing that made me want to help her in the first place. Then they leave, too. Grandma follows David to the parking lot, talking the whole time.
And then it’s just us. Standing in an empty meeting room with bad lighting, surrounded by metal chairs pushed back at crooked angles.
“Hey,” I murmur.
She looks up at me with tear tracks on both cheeks. “I love you,” I tell her.
I didn’t expect it to come out that easy. Easier than anything I’ve ever said in my life, actually, and I’ve spent twenty years making sure nothing comes easy. Easy means vulnerable, and vulnerable means somebody can take it away.
But this doesn’t feel like giving something up.
It feels like finally saying something that’s been sitting in my chest for days, taking up the space that used to belong to the noise and the anger, and the shit I’ve been carrying around since I was old enough to understand that nobody was going to carry it for me.
“What?” she whispers.
“I love you.” I take her hands in mine, engulfing them. “And I’m done fighting. Not football, but the other shit. The warehouses and all of it. I’m done.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Yeah, I do. I’ll get a regular job. I don’t care what it is.
I’m not going to do anything that puts you in danger ever again.
” My throat is tight, which is not a thing that usually happens to me, but I’m starting to get used to the changes she’s made in my life.
“You’re too important. You and your chickens, and your insane grandmother. I’m not losing any of it.”
She stares at me, and I watch as she processes this before she says, “I love you, too.”
The world is getting brighter when she adds, “But maybe you don’t have to, like, completely suppress every part of yourself all the time.”
“What do you mean?”
Her cheeks go pink. “I mean... it’s kind of hot when you lose it. A little bit.”
“You’re saying you like it when I get mad?”
“I’m saying it’s not... unattractive,” she murmurs as her face gets redder. “When it’s aimed at the right people. Like guys who make fun of my glasses or HOA presidents who mess with my chickens.”
She pushes her glasses up and adds, “I’m just saying, I didn’t fall for the calm, well-adjusted version of you.”
She’s right. That version of me doesn’t exist. It never has, and she knows it, and she’s still here with me. She still loves me.
“On the field,” I tell her. “That’s where it stays.”
She smiles. “On the field.”
“I mean it. No more punching my teammates in the dining hall.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Tyler kind of had it coming.”
“He did. But still.”
As we’re leaving, Grandma’s voice carries through the parking lot. “David, sweetheart, if you ever want a home-cooked meal... you should know I can’t cook, but I make a hell of a mimosa.”
Isla closes her eyes. “Please take me home before I have to witness her earn a restraining order.”
With her hand in mine, we walk to the truck. “Let’s go home.”
She leans against my arm as we walk across the lot.
The night air is cool and smells like cut grass.
The chickens are waiting at home, and Brad Pitt is probably strutting around like he owns the place, which he basically does.
Somewhere in this parking lot, Grandma Pickel is making a news reporter deeply uncomfortable. None of these are my problems exactly.
They’re better than my problems. They’re my life. And I’m fine with that.