On the fifth day a man from code enforcement arrived, which told me she had tried the city from another door. He looked at plates. He looked at the gaps. He looked at the garage door, which our cars were not blocking, and at her car, which she had placed in the path of the door and which our cars had then declined to make room for. He did not chalk the tires of the minivan. He spoke to her. She folded her arms. He left. The alerts that afternoon were only a cat and the mail carrier.
She tried the board email next. We had set an auto-reply that said we were out of the country, that the vehicles on the public street were registered and insured, and that any tow of those vehicles would be answered with the police report we already knew how to file. We attached nothing. Attachment could wait for a lawyer if she wanted one. She wrote three times. The third message dropped the word appearance and tried emergency access again. My wife read it over tea and said, “There is no emergency. There is a car she does not want to be seen losing to.” That was accurate. The pearl-white paint had a film of dust by the end of the first week. Pollen gathered in the wiper well. A flyer for a lost dog ended up under the wiper and stayed there, because nobody with a key she trusted was willing to become the person who moved the flyer and touched the story.
Neighbors began to stop. Not in a crowd. One at a time, the way people stop when they have decided the risk of being seen is smaller than the risk of pretending. The woman with the stroller paused on two different mornings. The man who had avoided my eyes at the coffee urn stood on the opposite sidewalk and looked at the measuring of the bumpers for a long time. On the ninth day, someone left a paper plate of cookies on our step with a note that said, simply, “The street is the city’s.” We ate the cookies when we got home. They were oatmeal. They had traveled worse than we had, and they were still the best evidence that the block was not only Karen.
Karen drove the hatchback for the full three weeks. Every pass of our corner required her to look at her own car held between a rusty minivan and a peeling sedan. She could not issue a fine that would survive a reading of her own rules, because those rules admitted, in language her predecessor had been too bored to abuse, that the association did not govern vehicles legally parked on dedicated city streets. She tried anyway. A citation appeared in the mail we had held at the post office, alleging “storage of derelict vehicles on a lot.” The minivan and the sedan were not on our lot. The photos she attached showed them on the curb, which disproved her caption. We kept the packet. Disproving herself was the most useful work she did that month.
On the twelfth day she had the white car washed by a man with a bucket who could reach the roof and could not reach a solution. The clean paint made the dust return faster. On the fifteenth day her husband appeared. He stood at the driver’s side for a while, hands in his pockets, and did not kick a tire. He looked at our dark windows. He looked at the center. He left on foot. I do not know what he said to her that night. I know the car did not move.