“Yeah?” The delivery boy was twentysomething and movie star handsome.
“Everything okay in there?” Jeremy asked.
The young man grinned broadly, revealing an impressive assortment of teeth. “What?” He sounded both confused and amused. The vehicle reeked of pot.
“The lady inside—she doing all right?”
“You’re eighty feet from her door, bro. Why don’t you ask her?”
After a moment of stunned silence, Jeremy shook off his embarrassment. The kid was clearly a moron. “Forget it. Sorry to bother you.”
Jeremy stepped back from the window and waited for the car to drive away. Then he looked up at the house. The sun had dipped below the horizon, but as usual, the house lights hadn’t turned on. In the growing darkness, the abundant foliage felt primal and threatening. God only knew what it might be hiding. Jeremy’s wife had recently filed for divorce, and their house at 261 Woodland was now on the market. An eyesore just down the street would strip thousands off their asking price. Something had to be done.
Jeremy was on the verge of marching right up to the front door and offering to mow the lady’s lawn himself. But when he tugged on the cockapoo’s leash, the dog resisted. Its head was still stuck in the brambles that had sprung up around the Osborne woman’s lawn. Annoyed, Jeremy gave the leash a yank. The dog yelped, but refused to budge, forcing him to reel it in like a fish. When the beast’s head emerged, Jeremy realized there was something clamped between its jaws. The object was fleshy, faintly gray in color, and ended in five limp fingers. The dog, whose name he could never remember, dropped its discovery at Jeremy’s feet.
Later, as he was speed-walking home, Jeremy made a mental list of the neighbors who might have seen him stumbling backward into the gutter while the dog mocked him with its slobbery grin. （As it turned out, only one person had witnessed the scene. Unfortunately, that person was a twelve-year-old with a popular TikTok account, whose video of the incident would break platform records.） After the tumble, which left his Dockers stained with sludge, Jeremy had crept toward the object with his palm poised to shield his eyes. He was one hundred percent certain the dog’s discovery had recently belonged to a human. Upon closer inspection, however, it appeared to be a species of mushroom. A monstrosity, Jeremy fumed as he cut across his own perfectly manicured lawn. If that was the kind of revolting fungus the Osborne woman was introducing to the neighborhood, the gloves would need to come off. It didn’t matter what people whispered about her. He wasn’t afraid to take her on. So as soon as he was safely inside his 1950s Cape Cod, Jeremy pulled out his phone and dialed an old friend, Brendon Baker.
Until March, Brendon Baker had never missed a meeting of the Mattauk Homeowners Association. His encyclopedic knowledge of the rules, and his fervor for enforcing them, had helped him rise from member to treasurer to president of the organization in record time. When he moved to Mattauk five years earlier, he’d been appalled by the town’s lackadaisical approach to landscaping. In the spring, the grass on half the town’s lawns had been allowed to grow far past the two-inch limit. In autumn, piles of leaves were left to molder for months. It took a single HOA gathering for Brendon to identify the problem. The board was composed of former stay-at-home moms who seemed far more interested in sourcing organic mulch for the playground or building beaches for babies than in enforcing regulations. When Brendon decided to run for a seat on the board, he went door-to-door every weekend, when he knew the husbands would be home. It was time, he convinced the men he met, for the HOA to finally get serious.
As soon as Brendon was elected president, he made good on his promise. Everyone he spoke with agreed that Mattauk had never looked better. Then, in March, complications from a hemorrhoid operation kept him home for a month. Brendon had never placed much faith in his HOA colleagues, and he knew work would pile up while he was away. But he’d never imagined that a dire situation like 256 Woodland Drive would remain unaddressed for so long.
His first day back from medical leave, Brendon walked into the HOA board meeting ten minutes late and dropped his leather messenger bag down on the table with a satisfying thump. Instead of claiming a seat, he crossed his arms over his fleshy chest and stood with his thighs pressed against the table’s edge, displaying his crotch for the five women who’d been waiting. He’d done this often, even before his condition had made sitting a challenge. His fellow board members couldn’t be certain he chose the posture on purpose, but all agreed it was completely revolting.