“I need my car. You took it off my property.”
“It was in the way. Mine is more expensive. It stays where it is safe. Yours can sit at the yard until you pay the release. That is how responsible communities handle clutter.”
A man near the coffee urn would not meet my eyes. A woman with a clipboard wrote something and did not read it back. I told Karen there were empty spaces fifty yards down the street. She ignored that. She said I should have waited until the meeting ended. She said the board could not be expected to hike in heels because a homeowner preferred his driveway to the association’s convenience. Then she followed me outside only far enough to move her car six inches, not out, just enough that I could not close the door on it and could not pretend it was not there. She did not apologize. I stood in the driveway after she went back inside and listened to the pool filter and thought, wrongly, that embarrassment would do the work a citation would not. I thought she had seen the line once she had been made to stand on it.
I was wrong in a way that cost us money, sleep, and the simple pleasure of coming home.
The impound lot was on the industrial edge of town, past the self-storage and the closed garden center. They wanted a release fee, a hook fee, and a daily if I did not arrive before six. I paid. The woman behind the glass did not care why the car had been taken. She cared that the invoice matched the plate. My sedan had a new scrape on the rear valance where the hook had kissed it. I drove it home and put it in the right bay, which was mine, and I closed the door, and I stood there a moment with my hand on the opener like a man checking a lock he no longer trusted.