That night my wife and I ate at the kitchen table with the bills between us. She is a practical woman. She had already photographed the garage, the card Karen had not yet started leaving, the tow receipt, the scrape. “We document,” she said. “We do not yell on the lawn. Yelling is what she will describe.” I agreed. I also felt the particular anger of a person who has been told his ordinary car is clutter. I have never been precious about cars. Mine was paid off. It started in January. It had a dent from a grocery cart I did not bother to fix. None of that was the point. The point was the driveway. The point was the door. The point was a stranger deciding that price was a form of title.
Over the next month she did it three more times.
The second time, my wife was at the grocery store. I was in the backyard tightening a hose bib. I heard a diesel idle, a chain, a door. By the time I came around the corner, her car was already on the flatbed and the white sedan was nosing into the left bay, the bay we had agreed was hers because she left in the dark. Karen’s nephew, a soft-faced man in a company shirt, would not look at me. Karen looked at me easily. She placed a handwritten card on her own dash. BOARD VEHICLE. DO NOT TOUCH.
“She’ll be back in an hour,” I said. “That is her car. She is buying milk.”
“Then she can collect it,” Karen said. “I’m not leaving this one outside while the lot is full of people who don’t watch their doors. Do you have any idea what a repaint costs on this model? No. You wouldn’t.”