“No.”
He smiled. It was the uncomplicated, generous smile of a child whose small problem has been solved, and it was worth every minute of the five-twenty alarm.
Karen handed me a coffee when I walked into the office.
“Neighbor problem resolved?” she said.
“Very.”
She looked at me over her mug. “Legally?”
“Specifically and entirely legally,” I said.
She nodded. “Good.”
I thought that was the end of it.
It was not, of course, the end of it.
Denise knocked on our door that evening at six forty-five.
Mark answered, because I was in the kitchen and he got there first, and he opened the door with the open-faced, pleasant expression of a man who has no reason to expect that the person on the other side is angry with his wife.
Denise said, “I need to speak to your wife.”
Mark turned and looked at me.
“What happened?” he said.
“Long story.”
“She had my car nearly towed,” Denise said, from the doorstep.
Mark turned back toward me with a careful, measuring expression.
“You what?”
“It didn’t get towed. She moved it.”
“She waited until I was asleep,” Denise said, “and called parking enforcement.”
Mark looked from Denise to me and back again with the expression of a man processing new information about multiple people simultaneously.
Ezoic
“Why?” he said.
I crossed my arms. “Because she blocked the driveway again.”
He turned to Denise. “Denise.”
She said immediately, “It was barely six in the morning.”
“That doesn’t make it better,” he said.
Which surprised me, honestly. Not because I doubted Mark, but because I had expected the instinct toward calm-chat diplomacy to kick in immediately, and instead he had positioned himself in about four seconds.
He stepped outside.
“How many times have I asked you not to park there?” he said.
