“Your father would have wanted the neighborhood to look nice, Garrett.” That is what the HOA president said to my face. I was standing in my own driveway, in the suit I had worn to my dad’s funeral that morning. The concrete beneath my dress shoes was painted yellow, traffic latex, spread thick over the surface my father had smoothed by hand thirty-two years ago. She had passed a fake resolution with three signatures instead of the four required. She had directed strangers to park on my property. She had covered my childhood handprint in paint while I was picking up a folded flag from a Marine honor guard. And then she smiled and told me my dead father would have approved.
I own a towing company. Three trucks. Georgia law lets me remove any unauthorized vehicle from my property without notice. But I did not start with the tow trucks. I started with her financial records. What I found was forty-seven thousand dollars in embezzlement. And that was just the beginning. Before I tell you how I cleared that driveway, you need to understand what it meant. What that concrete represented.
My father, Earl Ellison, bought our house at 114 Sycamore Lane in Ridgewood Estates, Forsyth County, Georgia, in the spring of 1991, for sixty-two thousand dollars cash. He paid with a check drawn on money he had saved driving long-haul freight for nineteen years, every state east of the Rockies. Earl was a trucker. Before that, he was a Marine. Before that, he was a seventeen-year-old kid from Waycross who lied about his age to enlist, because the recruiter said he could see the ocean.
The day the driveway got poured, I was eight years old. I remember holding the garden hose while my dad worked the screed board back and forth across wet concrete in the July heat. Cicadas screamed in the pines behind the house. The air tasted like dust and fresh cement. Earl’s forearms were brown from the sun and gray from the mix. He let me press my handprint into the corner near the garage before it set. That handprint is still there. Or it was, before Shelley Bancroft painted over it with traffic-grade latex.