The oaks carried the highest figures, as I might have guessed, their slow growth priced honestly by the city's own arithmetic at last. The red maples followed close behind, valued for canopy and condition and for the decades replacement saplings would need to equal them. Line by line the total climbed past figures I associated with cars and roofs and college semesters.
When she reached the bottom line, she turned the form around so Hannah and I could read it together without leaning. The city's restoration valuation for the six trees stood at $24,800, printed in her exact hand. Hannah read the number aloud once, quietly, as if volume might change it into something else.
Mr. Alvarez explained that the figure represented restoration value, the calculated cost of replanting, establishing, and compensating for lost canopy under the schedule. He said it was the city's number, defensible in any proceeding, and separate from any private claim I might pursue. He said private claims for mature trees often ran higher, and he let that sentence stand alone.
I copied the figure into the notebook, wrote it in words as well as numerals, and had Hannah witness the page with her initials. Twenty-four thousand eight hundred dollars, for six trees a signature had converted into firewood and mulch in a single morning. The number did not measure the shade, or my father, or October, and all of us at the table knew it.
Ms. Nguyen gave me the carbon of her form and a pamphlet of her own, this one about replanting standards and soil preparation after removals. Unlike Karen's pamphlet, hers assumed the reader had lost something real and intended to rebuild it correctly. I placed it in the folder uncreased, and Hannah did not fold this one at all.
Mr. Alvarez said the city would send its findings to the association and to the management company as part of its inquiry. He said the inquiry now concerned the authorization claimed for the work and the absence of any permit for it. He used the word inquiry the way Ms. Nguyen had used assessment, carefully, and I noted that too.
Before they left the table, he asked whether I knew of other removals in Maple Grove performed by the same company that season. I told him I knew of none personally, but the question itself rearranged something in my understanding of the morning. He said permit patterns sometimes mattered, and he would be checking the division's records for the subdivision as a whole.
Outside again, the orange ribbons snapped in a strengthening breeze, bright against the pale stumps and the dark fence line. A neighbor I barely knew slowed his car, read the scene, and drove on with the expression of a man postponing a phone call. The ribbons, I realized, announced to the whole street that the city had taken an interest.
Mrs. Delgado came down her steps as the inspectors packed their truck, carrying a printed still from her footage in a sheet protector. The still showed the man with the pink tape at the second oak, time stamp crisp in the corner like a caption. She gave it to Mr. Alvarez, who thanked her with the gravity of a man accepting an exhibit.
She told him she had thirty-one years of county records experience and had already labeled her copies by date, hour, and camera angle. Mr. Alvarez said the county's loss had plainly become the city's gain that week, and she accepted the compliment as her due. She asked whether he would need her at any hearing, and he said he suspected he would.
Mrs. Park called while the city truck still idled at my curb, and Hannah answered because my hands were full of forms. I heard Hannah say yes, six, and yes, the city was present, and then hold the phone away as Mrs. Park's voice rose. When she handed it to me, she mouthed the word frightened, exactly as I had described Thompson.
Mrs. Park, the board's secretary, kept every set of Maple Grove minutes in binders she was famous for maintaining to the page. She told me she had searched her binders that morning for any vote, any motion, any mention of my trees or my street. She said the binders contained nothing, and her own memory contained nothing, and one of those facts would have been enough.
She asked, in a voice that kept breaking its own composure, whether Karen had truly signed as a representative for my property specifically. I told her the signature sat in the representative box above my address, and the city had just photographed it. The silence that followed contained, I thought, the sound of a binder closing somewhere across the neighborhood.
She said the secretary's records were the board's records, and if the board had acted, she would possess the paper trail of that action. She said its absence was itself a fact she was prepared to state in writing if required. I thanked her and wrote her words down, and my handwriting had become almost calm by then.
US DRAMA
She told me Mr. Thompson had already spoken with her, and that Mr. Osei was driving back from his sister's house a day early. She said two members could call an emergency meeting, but she believed three would sign the call before dinner. She said Ms. Ruiz had been telephoned, and that the conversation had not gone the way Karen expected.
I asked what Ms. Ruiz had said, and Mrs. Park answered with the caution of a secretary who knew her words might be minuted someday. She said counsel had advised the board to preserve all documents and to make no further statements about the removal. She said Karen had described that advice as an overreaction, within hearing of the management office staff.