Chapter 15 — R311.2

The county sent a building inspector on the Tuesday. That is not standard. Okoro requested it, and Okoro requested it because I told her about the lock myself, on the Saturday morning, before anybody had asked me a single question about doors.

I want one thing on my side of the ledger and that is the only one I have.

The inspector was a man in his sixties named Halvorsen and he looked at that door for about four seconds.

Halvorsen: Yeah. That's not permitted.

Mark: I know what it is now.

Halvorsen: Everybody does, after. You'd be amazed how many of these I pull off doors in this county. People put them on because of glass — they figure a burglar breaks the pane, reaches through, turns the thumb-turn. Which is true. That is a real thing that happens.

Mark: I put it on because my kid was sleepwalking out.

Halvorsen: Also a real thing. And also why the code doesn't care about your reason. The door has one job in an emergency and that job is to open.

It went in the file as a violation. It is not a crime. Nobody charged me with anything and nobody was ever going to.

What it did was put a sentence into a county document that reads, in effect: *the door through which the child could not re-enter had been modified by the child's father in a manner not permitted by adopted code.*

I have a copy of it. I keep it in the folder in the truck with the boiler code.