My Neighbor Parked In My Driveway For Six Months Until 30 Cars Blocked Hers
whole side of the street, farmland once, back when this was the edge of town instead of the middle of it. Over the years he had divided it up, carved it into the separate lots the houses now
sat on, and eventually he’d sold the house next door, Linda’s house, to Linda herself. He knew every property line on this street the way I knew the rooms of my own home, because he had
drawn most of them. He was also one of the oldest and most beloved members of Robert’s car club, and the two of them had spent countless hours together over the years, heads under one
hood or another.
Arthur made his way up to the edge of the driveway and stopped, taking in the whole scene with
those sharp old eyes. He looked at Linda standing there in her robe and slippers. He looked at her SUV, sitting square in the middle of my driveway. Then he looked at the long line of gleaming
classic cars boxing it in, and then back at Linda, and his white eyebrows drew slowly together.
“Linda?”
She said nothing at all.
He lifted his cane and pointed it at the SUV. “Don’t tell me that’s your vehicle. Sitting there in Carol’s
driveway.”
“It’s complicated, Arthur.”
He looked around at the thirty cars, the crowd of people, the breakfast unfolding on the patio. “Not really. Doesn’t look the least bit complicated to me.”
Linda crossed her arms tightly over her robe. “I parked here for a little while. That’s all it is.”
“Why?” Arthur asked, genuinely, as if he couldn’t imagine the reasoning. “You’ve got a perfectly good driveway of your own not thirty feet away.”
“It’s being landscaped this morning. There’s a crew.”
“So?” he said. “A crew for an hour. You couldn’t park on the street like everybody else?”
Linda shot a quick glance at me, then away. “It’s not like Carol needs all this space.”
And Arthur’s whole expression shifted then. For the first time I saw something genuinely stern come into that kind, weathered old face, the look of a man who has run out of patience for
something he considered settled long ago.
“I showed you the property line myself,” he said quietly. “The very day you came to look at that house.”
Silence. A long, heavy one, with only the sound of laughter drifting over from the backyard.
I turned and looked at Linda. “You knew?”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Arthur kept going, his voice low but hard as the brass head of his cane. “When you were buying that house, you asked me specifically about overflow parking. You were worried about where your
visitors would leave their cars, remember? And I told you, plain as day, standing right about where you’re standing now, that this driveway and this gravel lane belong to the property next
door. To Robert and Carol. I walked you to the line and I pointed it out to you with this very cane.”
Linda’s face had gone tight with fury now, all the wounded-innocent act stripped away. “I know whose driveway it is.”
And there it was. Out loud, at last, in front of witnesses.
For six whole months, some small, stubbornly charitable part of me had kept wondering whether Linda genuinely, honestly believed that the gravel lane was some kind of shared neighborhood
common space, whether this whole miserable business was just an innocent misunderstanding that I had somehow failed to clear up properly.
She didn’t believe that. She never had, not for a single day. She had known exactly whose property it was from the moment she signed her closing papers. She had simply decided that my
ownership didn’t count for much, because I wasn’t using the land in a way she personally judged sufficient. She’d known the whole time, and she just hadn’t cared, and now everyone standing in my
driveway knew it too.
Arthur shook his head slowly, disappointment heavy in it. “Then why in the world are we even having this conversation?”
“Because she blocked me in!” Linda snapped, jabbing a finger toward the wall of cars.
Arthur turned and looked at her SUV, sitting there in the middle of my driveway exactly where she
had left it, uninvited, that very morning. Then he looked back at her, and the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
“Seems to me,” he said, “you blocked yourself in.”
I had to lift my mug to my face to hide my smile.
Linda did not appreciate that. “I’m calling the police,” she announced, drawing herself up.
“Okay,” I said simply, and took another sip of coffee.
That stopped her cold. She’d clearly been expecting me to panic at the word police, to fold, to start hurriedly waving my arms and telling everyone to move their cars and clear out. That was, I
think, what always used to happen with Linda. People folded. She counted on it.
“What?” she said, thrown.
“I said okay. Go ahead and call them. I’ve got nothing to hide and a driveway full of proof.”
So she did. She pulled her phone out of the pocket of her robe and called the police right there
