Ezoic
I lowered my voice.
“I don’t need us to be friends,” I said. “I don’t need an apology, though one would be appropriate. I just need the driveway clear. That’s all I have ever needed.”
Denise stood on my doorstep for a moment without speaking.
Then she said, “I think involving authorities was excessive.”
“I think twenty-two mornings was excessive,” I said.
She left.
For a week, the driveway was clear.
Every morning I came downstairs and looked out the kitchen window and the space at the end of my driveway was simply empty, as it was always supposed to be, and I felt the particular relief of someone whose low-grade chronic problem has temporarily resolved.
Then Monday of the following week.
Seven-twenty. I opened the front door.
Silver Corsa, across the driveway entrance, in exactly the same position, as if the previous week had not occurred.
I stood in the doorway for a moment.
Mark came up behind me.
“No,” he said.
“Yes.”
He stared at it. Then at me.
“Is she genuinely—”
“I think,” I said, “she decided we wouldn’t do it twice.”
I took one photograph. Not twenty-two. One, timestamped, added to the existing case file.
Then I made the call.
This time the enforcement officer who arrived was the same one from the previous week.
He recognized the address. He may have recognized the car. His expression when he got out of his vehicle was the professionally neutral expression of a man who has seen this particular situation before and knows how it ends.
Ezoic
Denise came outside fully dressed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.
“Morning,” the officer said.
“This is persecution.”
“This,” he said, looking at his device, “appears to be the same driveway access point as the previous complaint.”
