The silence that followed was extraordinary.
The enforcement officer looked at his clipboard. The recovery driver looked at the front wheel of the Corsa. Denise looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen from her before, which was not quite anger and not quite recognition but somewhere between them.
Ezoic
Then from the kitchen behind me: “Mum?”
I turned. Oliver was standing in the hallway in his dinosaur pajamas, hair flattened on one side, looking at the scene outside with the calm curiosity of a child who has not yet understood what he is witnessing.
Ben appeared behind him. Ben saw the recovery truck.
His eyes went enormous.
“Is her car getting arrested?”
The recovery driver made a sound he immediately converted into a cough.
I pressed my hand over my mouth.
“No, sweetheart.”
“Cars can get arrested?”
“No.”
Oliver looked deeply disappointed by this information.
Denise said, sharply, “Can you keep them inside?”
That, as it turned out, was the wrong thing to say.
I stepped out of the doorway.
“Do not bring my children into this conversation.”
“They’re standing there staring—”
“They have spent three mornings sitting in my car on that driveway while you made them late for school. They can stand in their own hallway.”
Ben, with the superb timing that is the particular gift of eight-year-olds, said, “We were late because of her car.”
Ezoic
“Ben,” I said. “Go upstairs.”
“But I just want to—”
“Upstairs. Now.”
Both boys evaporated.
Denise pointed at the house. “You see, this is exactly what I mean. You’re making this enormous—”
“You parked across my driveway twenty-two mornings in a row,” I said. “I’m not making anything larger than it is.”
“It wasn’t twenty-two.”
I opened the photographs on my phone.
“May twenty-seventh,” I said. “Twenty-eighth. Twenty-ninth. Thirty-first. June third—”
