“I didn’t hire you.”
“You didn’t have to. It needed it. Look at it.”
I looked. The door was not cleaner. It was assaulted. The jet had lifted the edge of a clear-bra strip near the mirror. The bottle’s product had gone on before the rinse, or instead of a rinse, and the gloss had already given up a thumb-sized bloom above the handle. “That’s not a wash,” I said. “Whatever is in that bottle doesn’t belong on paint. Stop. Don’t bill me. Don’t come back with a hose.”
“Association account,” she said, as if I had asked for routing numbers. “Memo it car care. If you make this difficult, the board has ways to note a debt. I also know people at the city. A man who hires a wash and refuses to pay is a story officers understand.”
“I didn’t hire a wash.”
She tipped her head toward the lens over the door, saw it, and decided it was furniture. “Footage can be unclear. My statement won’t be.”
She coiled the hose with offended precision and went back to the center, where folding chairs scraped and someone laughed at a joke that had nothing to do with paint. I stood in the driveway until the dripping slowed. Then I did the unglamorous things that later became the case. I photographed the door wet. I photographed the bottle she had left for a moment on the center steps before a volunteer carried it inside, label half-turned, the brand visible enough for a shop to name it. I photographed the hose path across the sidewalk. I saved the camera clip to three places before I went back for the coffee, which was cold, which felt correct.
My wife came home from the nursery with a flat of herbs and stopped when she saw the door. She did not touch the bloom. She knew better. “Tell me she asked,” she said.
“She billed me after.”
“For a hundred.”