Earl drove six days a week for most of my childhood. He would roll in late on Friday nights smelling like diesel and truck-stop coffee. He would drop his bag by the door and sit on that driveway in a lawn chair with a Budweiser while I told him about school. The concrete was always warm in the summer. I remember the heat coming up through my shorts. I grew up, went to trade school, worked repo for a fleet company for twelve years. Six years ago, I started Ellison Towing. Three trucks. A flatbed, a wheel-lift, and a medium-duty wrecker. I ran sixty-hour weeks out of a rented lot on Highway 9, pulling wrecks off 400, clearing private lots, doing contract work for body shops and apartment complexes across north Forsyth. The trucks came home to my driveway every night. Earl’s driveway. He was proud of that.
Fourteen months before all of this, Earl was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. Fifty years of Marlboro Reds and diesel fumes had caught up. He moved in with me at 114 Sycamore because his apartment in Dawsonville had stairs he could not climb anymore. We set up a hospital bed in the living room, where he could see the front yard. He would watch my trucks come home at the end of the day. Some nights he would wave from the window. Some nights he was too tired.
Shelley Bancroft showed up two weeks after Earl moved in. She called it a welcome visit. She stood on my porch in a linen blazer over yoga pants, pearl earrings, blonde bob shellacked into place. She told me she was so happy to finally meet the homeowner. Then she looked past me at the flatbed parked in the driveway. She asked if I was aware that commercial vehicles created visual disruption for neighboring property values. I told her the trucks were under fourteen thousand pounds and parked on private property. She smiled the way a dental hygienist smiles before she scrapes. Two weeks later, I got the first violation letter.
Earl died on a Tuesday in March, quietly, in the living room, with the window open. I could hear a lawn mower somewhere down the street. The hospice nurse said he went easy. I do not know what easy means when you watch your father stop breathing. The funeral was in Savannah, because that is where Earl’s Marine unit buddies lived. Three days. A small church with wooden pews and stained glass that threw colored light on the casket. Six old men in dress blues who had not seen each other in decades. The honor guard folded the flag with white gloves. A bugler played taps from the far end of the cemetery. The notes hung in the salt air like they did not want to land.
I drove home on Sunday with the flag on the passenger seat and a hollow ache behind my sternum that had not started to fade. I turned onto Sycamore Lane at four in the afternoon. The sun was low and gold through the pines. And there it was. My driveway. Bright yellow. Four cars I had never seen. A laminated sign. And Shelley Bancroft’s white Tahoe parked at the curb like a period at the end of a sentence.