My wife set the suitcase down. Her hands were steady. “If we touch her car,” she said, “she gets the story. The scratch. The claim. The post about vandalism.”
“We don’t touch it,” I said. “She won’t leave it in the garage once the meeting ends and the sidewalk has eyes. She never does, not overnight, not if someone is watching. She moves it to the curb, tight against the door, so she can still say we blocked ourselves. That’s the move. That’s the street.”
We waited inside with the lights low. The camera over the doorbell watched the apron. Forty minutes later the side door of the center opened. Karen came out alone, checked the sidewalk, and backed the white sedan out of our garage. She did not take it down the block to the legal overflow. She parked it parallel to the curb, so close to the garage opening that the door would stop on her bumper and neither of our cars, had we still had one in reach, could have rolled out. Habit. The same habit, moved six feet, now sitting on asphalt the city plowed.
That was the opening.
I told my wife it was time. She smiled, not a happy smile, a finished one. She took the keys to the teal minivan. I took the yellow sedan. We walked down the block like people going to move their own legally parked cars, because that is what we were. She pulled the minivan up to the front of the white sedan and parallel parked with a patience I have admired since the year we met. The rear bumper of the minivan rested half an inch from the front bumper of Karen’s car. She turned the engine off. She locked the doors. She checked the gap with a flat hand and did not touch the white paint. She handed me nothing I did not already have, and she stepped back.