I started a folder. Tow receipts. Citations. Photos. The neighbor’s clip. The vendor pass, which the nephew had dropped a copy of and which I had not returned, because returning it would have been politeness and we were past the point where politeness was being reciprocated. My wife added a notebook in her handwriting, times and dates, who was present, what was said. She wrote the word lesser the first time she heard it, and then she stopped writing that word and wrote the plate number instead. “The word is for her,” she said. “The plate is for the report.”
Then the next weekend they had another event at the center, and I looked out the front window and saw the white sedan already inside our garage. The door was stopped halfway down on her roof rails. Our car was gone from the driveway. A yellow tow receipt was tucked under the mat at the side door, where the rain would not reach it and where we would have to bend to find it. The line for authorizing party had her signature and the words emergency association access. There had been no emergency. There had been a dessert social and a sign-up sheet for the holiday lights.
I called the towing company listed on the signs around the neighborhood. I told the dispatcher that a vehicle had been removed from my private driveway without my consent, and that another vehicle was now inside my garage, and that I needed the second vehicle removed. There was a pause. She asked me to repeat the plate of the car in the garage. I repeated it. She asked me to hold. When she came back, her voice had changed the way a voice changes when a policy has entered it. She said a truck would come to “assess.” She did not say it would tow.
A truck rumbled down our street. The driver was not the nephew. He was older, careful with his knees, the sort of man who has hooked enough cars to know which jobs become stories. He looked at the white sedan. He looked at the plate. He looked at me with an apology already arranged. He could not tow that car. His company had an exclusive contract with the association to handle parking enforcement and the board’s “access” calls. The person who signed the checks and authorized the renewals was the president. If he hooked her car, his boss would fire him before the end of the shift, and the company would lose the route. He said this without pleasure. He said it the way a man says a weather report he does not like.
I asked what I was supposed to do. He shrugged, not unkindly. He suggested the police non-emergency line. He looked at the garage again, at the door resting on the rails, and he said, quietly, “I didn’t vote for this contract. I just drive.” Then he left. The white car stayed. The door stayed open. A child on a bicycle slowed, looked, and was called onward by a parent who did not want to be a witness with a name.