PART 2 — THE MEETING IN OCTOBER
I need to go back six months, because the driveway is not a small thing in this and it is the reason there were three cars on that street.
I bought that house on Kestrel Court four years ago. I am forty-one, I am a project scheduler for a bridge contractor, and I bought it on my own after a divorce, which in that neighbourhood took about eleven months to stop being the thing people knew about me.
Verna Dunlop has been in the house next door since 1999. She was a school secretary for twenty-six years and she retired in 2020, and she is, and I am being fair, the person on that street who notices when somebody’s mother is unwell.
The driveway strip was not a misunderstanding. She knew. She had a copy of the plat; her husband had one from a boundary thing in 2007.
What she had was twenty-six years of it being hers in practice, which in a street like that is a form of ownership that does not appear on any document and that is extremely real.
In the October there was a neighbourhood association meeting in the community room behind the fire station. About thirty people.
It is a meeting about drainage and speed bumps. It has no authority over anything.
I went because I was tired and because I had decided to be reasonable in public, which I now think was my actual mistake.
I brought the survey. Printed, folded, in a plastic sleeve.
I got about a sentence out — that I wanted to raise something about parking on Kestrel and that I had the plat if anybody wanted to see it — and Verna came out of the third row.
She took the sleeve out of my hands. Both hands, no hesitation, the way you take a menu off a waiter.
She folded it in half and held it down at her side.
And she said, to thirty people:
“Give me that. You’ve been here four years. That drive was shared before you turned up and it’ll be shared after you’ve gone. Now sit down.”
The room went quiet.
Thirty people. A man from the corner house who had helped me move a freezer in the March. The woman who runs the little library box.
Nobody said one word.
And I sat down.
I want that in the record because for six months afterward I told myself I had been the reasonable one, and I had not. I had been the silent one, which is different, and then I had spent the winter escalating in writing instead of speaking.
The towing was on a Tuesday and it cost me two hundred and eleven dollars, which I did not get back, and I want to be honest that when I made that call I felt fantastic for about ninety minutes.
I should set out the six months in between, because the version I told people at the time was tidier than what happened.
After that meeting I stopped talking to her. Completely. Four years of good morning across a fence and I ended it in one week, and she noticed, and she started doing it back.
Then it went into writing, which is what people like me do.
The first letter was polite and had the plat attached. The second one was less polite and mentioned my attorney, who I had not engaged and had no intention of engaging.
In the January I put a cone out. She moved it onto my lawn. In the February I put two cones out and she stacked them by my bins.
In the March I started photographing her vehicle on that strip with a timestamp, and I did it for eleven weeks, and I have forty-one photographs of a neighbour’s car that I will never do anything with.
That is the part I am least proud of. Not the towing. The eleven weeks of standing at a bedroom window at half past six in the morning with a phone.
There was also a thing in the April that I did not understand until much later.
She came over. Actually came to my door, first time in five months, and stood on the step and said she wanted to sort it out, and that her husband had had a diagnosis in the February and she could not be doing with this on top.
And I said — and I remember exactly how I said it — that I was very sorry to hear that and that it did not change where the line was.
She looked at me for a second and then she said all right, and went home.
Her husband Royce died in the September, four months after the paint.
I did not know about the diagnosis until I heard about the funeral. She had told one person on that street and it was not me and I had had my chance in April and had used it to talk about a survey.
None of that excuses a bucket of paint at two in the morning and she has never once offered it as an excuse.
I am putting it in because it is true and because I have had to stop telling a version of this in which there is one unreasonable person on Kestrel Court.
