I took both titles to the Department of Motor Vehicles and stood in line for three hours. I paid the registration fees. I came away with ordinary plates, the same kind of plates the white sedan wore, which mattered more than the paint. I called our insurance agent, a man we had used for years, and put the cheapest bare-minimum liability on both. He asked if I was starting a collection. I said I was solving a parking problem. He did not ask a second question. He has sold policies long enough to know when a second question is a hobby. They were now fully street legal. They were also, to a woman who ranked the world by sticker price, an insult that could not be towed without breaking a law she did not administer.
I drove the minivan home after dark and parked it on a street a few blocks away, legally, at the curb, not in front of anyone’s door. I took a rideshare back, picked up the yellow sedan, and parked it near the minivan. Then I waited. Waiting was the hardest part. Every evening that week Karen’s sedan appeared somewhere near the center, and every evening I did not move the trap early. Early would have been a warning. She had already shown she used warnings as time to call a nephew.
The night before we were scheduled to fly, the board hosted its annual summer planning meeting. It was a Friday. Just as I expected, Karen pulled onto our street in the pearl-white sedan. She ignored the empty spaces down the block. She had called the tower before she even turned in, because the flatbed was already idling two houses away, which meant she had arranged the taking of our car as part of her arrival, not as a response to it. I was carrying a suitcase to the porch. My wife was locking the back door. We watched our sedan, the paid-off one with the grocery-cart dent, rise on the hook. Karen eased the white car into the garage as if she were checking into a hotel that had been held in her name. She got out. She smoothed her blazer. She looked at the suitcases and smiled with the same mouth she had used for lesser.
“I’m not leaving a car of this value outside while you two go on vacation,” she said. A board member waited on the sidewalk, pretending to read a text. “Yours is at the yard. Mine will be safer in here. If you had spent your money on something worth protecting, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Try not to make a mess of the bay. I’ll need it for three weeks if you’re really going.”
Then she walked into the center to plan a summer she intended to supervise from inside our house.