Ezoic
I had no problem with this. I was perfectly happy to be the newer arrival who defers to local knowledge. I had no investment in being right about where the bins went on collection day or which way the traffic built up on school mornings. Denise knew the neighborhood. Fine.
The parking started about four months after we moved in.
It began, as these things often do, as something so minor and so brief that responding to it would have felt disproportionate. Denise would park outside our driveway for ten minutes in the morning, sometimes less. She was clearly popping somewhere nearby. Her car would be there when I came downstairs and gone by the time I needed to leave. I noticed it, but notice is not the same as inconvenience, and inconvenience is not always the same as a problem.
Then it became a problem.
I don’t know exactly when the shift happened. It wasn’t a single morning, it was a slow accumulation of mornings where the car was there slightly longer, where I needed to leave slightly earlier, where the car was gone from the driveway but I was already backing out and then had to stop and wait while Denise reversed it out of my way with the unhurried air of someone doing me a favor.
Ezoic
The first time it actually made us late was a Tuesday in late May.
Ben and Oliver were in the back seat in school uniform, packed and ready, and Denise’s car was sitting across the end of the driveway at seven-forty, and I couldn’t get out. I knocked on her door for three minutes before she answered. She was still in her dressing gown.
“I’ll move it in a minute,” she said. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“We’re going to be late,” I said.
“It’ll just be a minute.”
It was nine minutes.
Ben got a late mark. He was seven years old and he got a late mark on his register and he came home that afternoon subdued in the specific way of a child who has been embarrassed in front of their class by something they didn’t understand and couldn’t control.
