My Neighbor Parked In My Driveway For Six Months Until 30 Cars Blocked Hers
He’d bought his first classic, a beat-up Pontiac, the year before we got married, and he restored it slowly over a decade, one paycheck at a time, in the detached garage he treated like a chapel. We
weren’t wealthy people. Robert worked as a machinist and I taught third grade for thirty-one years, and there were plenty of months when the car had to wait because the roof needed
patching or one of the kids needed braces. But that Pontiac was the one indulgence he allowed himself, and watching him out there on a Sunday afternoon with the radio on and grease to his
elbows was worth every dollar it kept us from saving.
Every September, Robert and I hosted a breakfast in the backyard for the whole club. Cars would
line the driveway bumper to bumper and spill out onto the private gravel lane that ran behind our house, a strip of land that came with the property and that Robert kept immaculately graded,
raking it smooth every spring like other men mow a lawn. He’d be out there before sunrise on the morning of, directing everyone into place like a man working an airport tarmac.
“Move that Chevy another foot! Another foot, I said!”
“Robert,” I’d holler from the porch, “nobody can hear you over the engines!”
“That’s exactly why I’m yelling!”
Those mornings smelled like coffee and cut grass and exhaust, and they sounded like laughter and slamming car doors and men arguing cheerfully about carburetors, and they were, though I
didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, some of the happiest hours of my whole life. You never do appreciate those ordinary golden mornings while you’re standing in the middle of them. You only
understand what they were later, once they’ve stopped, and you’d give anything on earth for just one more.
After Robert died, I stopped hosting the breakfast. I stopped going to the club events entirely. It turned out that seeing all those beautiful old cars lined up in a row without Robert somewhere
among them, gesturing with a coffee cup, hurt far more than I had expected it to. Every polished fender was a place where he should have been standing and wasn’t.
He went quickly, in the end, which everyone kept telling me was a mercy. A heart attack on an ordinary Tuesday, in the garage, with the hood of the Pontiac up. The doctors said he likely never
knew what happened. I’ve turned that over a thousand times since, whether it was a mercy or just a theft with the lights turned off, and I still don’t know. What I know is that one morning I had a
husband arguing with the radio in the garage, and by that afternoon I was sitting in a hospital corridor signing forms with a pen that kept running dry, listening to a young man in scrubs use the word “unfortunately.”
The months after were a fog of casseroles and paperwork. The life insurance, the pension paperwork, the man at the bank walking me gently through switching everything into my name
alone. I sold the Pontiac six months later to a member of the club who promised to keep it running, and I cried in the driveway when they drove it away, and then I felt guilty for keeping it
that long, and then guilty for selling it at all. Grief makes a liar and a fool of you in a dozen small ways nobody warns you about.
So the driveway went quiet. The gravel lane grew a thin line of weeds down its center that Robert never would have tolerated for a single day. And the phone stopped ringing on Saturday
mornings, because I’d stopped answering it, and eventually people stopped calling, the way they do, not out of unkindness but because grief is exhausting to stand next to and most people can
only do it for so long.
Linda apparently saw all that emptiness as an invitation addressed personally to her.
The first time she parked there, I honestly didn’t care. Grief makes you strange about what you notice and what you let slide. Whole weeks had gone by that year where I couldn’t have told you
what day it was, so a neighbor borrowing a corner of my driveway barely registered. By the fifth time, though, something in me had started to bristle, some small ember of self-respect stirring
back to life under all the ash.
“Linda, could you please use your own driveway?”
“I’m only going across the street for a minute.”
“That’s fine, but this is still my driveway.”
She moved it, that time, with a little sigh that told me exactly how unreasonable and tiresome she
found me. And the next week, she did the whole thing all over again, and the week after that, until it stopped being an occasional thing and became simply the state of the world, her SUV in my
driveway as regular as the sunrise.
Eventually I stopped asking nicely, because nicely plainly wasn’t working, and a person can only be ignored so many times before something in them hardens.
One afternoon I came home from the grocery store to find her SUV parked squarely in my driveway again, and there wasn’t room to pull my own car in beside it, so I had to leave mine on
