My Neighbor Parked In My Driveway For Six Months Until 30 Cars Blocked Hers
the lane Robert used to rake smooth, exactly the way they used to fill it on the best mornings of my old life.
And every single person who climbed out was carrying something. Thermoses of coffee. Folding aluminum lawn chairs. Foil-covered breakfast casseroles still warm from somebody’s oven. Boxes
of donuts from the good bakery two towns over. A cooler full of orange juice. One enormous man I didn’t recognize, new to the club since Robert’s time, carried in what must have been three
pounds of bacon and announced to no one in particular that he’d brought two cast-iron skillets because he trusted absolutely no one else present to cook it properly.
Nobody was leaving. That was the thing. Every one of them was walking, arms full and faces bright, toward my backyard, toward the smell of coffee and the sound of a griddle warming up
on the patio, and my quiet, dead, roped-off house was suddenly loud and warm and alive in a way it hadn’t been since the last time I heard Robert’s voice.
I was in the kitchen pouring a fresh pot when I heard Linda.
“What the hell is this?!”
I stepped out onto my porch with my mug in both hands, calm as anything.
“Morning,” I said, as pleasant as if it were any ordinary day.
She was standing beside her SUV in a bathrobe and slippers, her hair still flat from the pillow, staring at the wall of chrome and steel that had materialized around her vehicle.
“Move these cars!”
“I can’t,” I said pleasantly.
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“People are eating, Linda. It’d be rude to interrupt.”
“I have work!”
I took a slow sip of my coffee. “You barely use your car anyway.”
Her face went a deep, satisfying red. “Are you serious right now?”
“Very.”
“You did this on purpose!”
“I invited some friends over for breakfast,” I said. “It’s a free country.”
“Thirty friends?!”
“Robert was popular.”
She looked past me at the backyard, where three dozen people were unfolding chairs and cracking eggs and laughing, and I watched it dawn on her that not one of them was going anywhere.
“I’m blocked in!” she said, pointing at her SUV.
“Yes,” I agreed. “You are.”
“You need to tell them to move their cars.”
“Eventually.”
“Eventually? I have to leave now!”
“That’s unfortunate,” I said, and took another sip.
“Carol!”
I know I shouldn’t have enjoyed it. I am not, by nature, a person who takes pleasure in other people’s misery. I spent thirty-one years teaching third graders to share and take turns and be
kind, and I meant every word of it. But standing there on my own porch in the morning sun with a good hot cup of coffee in my hands, watching Linda finally, finally understand from the inside
what it feels like to be trapped and helpless because someone else simply couldn’t be bothered to care about your morning, I have to be honest with you.
I enjoyed it. Thoroughly. I enjoyed every single second of it, and I have made my peace with that.
And then Linda’s gaze drifted toward the last car pulling slowly into the gravel lane, and everything on her face changed.
It was the powder-blue Cadillac. It eased to a stop, and the driver’s door opened, and an elderly
man climbed out, tall and thin and moving with great care, steadying himself with a polished wooden cane.
The instant Linda saw him, she went absolutely still. Her coffee mug slipped right out of her hand and dropped into the grass with a soft thud, spilling in a brown fan across the lawn. She didn’t even look down at it.
“No,” she said quietly. “No, no.”
I recognized him at once, and my heart lifted.
“Arthur!”
He raised one hand off the cane in greeting. “Morning, Carol. Wouldn’t have missed it.”
Arthur was eighty-two years old, and he had lived in this neighborhood since long before Robert and I ever arrived. In fact, decades earlier, Arthur’s family had owned most of the land along our
