The Cadillac That Finally Paid Me Back

Brent Kessler was about forty-five, I would guess, and he had moved out from the city for what he called the lifestyle. He told me that the first week, when I walked over to introduce myself the way my father taught me to. I brought a loaf of Peg’s banana bread on a paper plate covered in foil, and I stood on his new blacktop driveway and put out my hand, and he looked at the banana bread like I had handed him something I found in the road.

“We’re really into the whole small-town lifestyle thing,” he told me, not taking the bread. “The pace. The quiet. It’s very us.”

I said that was nice and that we were glad to have him, and I told him if he ever needed anything to just holler, because that is what you say. He said something about how he worked remotely in finance and had people he called for things, and he said it like that settled the matter of ever needing to holler.

I walked back across the street with the banana bread still in my hands. Peg met me at the door. I told her he was busy. She ate a slice standing at the counter and said he did not know what he was missing, and she was right, but not in the way she meant.

Now. The trash cans.

On Delaney Street, the garbage truck comes Thursday mornings. It has come Thursday mornings my entire adult life. You roll your cans down to the curb Wednesday night or early Thursday, and Hutchins Sanitation comes through around seven with a truck that has a claw on the side, and the claw grabs the can and dumps it and sets it back down, more or less where it found it, and that is that. Everybody on the street knows the rhythm of it. You could set a clock by Darryl Hutchins and that groaning truck.

My cans sat at the end of my driveway, on my side, where they had sat for thirty-one years. Two gray Hutchins cans with my house number painted on the side in white because Carl Dunmore and I had painted both our numbers on with the same brush one afternoon back in 2009.

The trouble was the corner.

My driveway meets Delaney Street right where the street bends. Brent’s driveway is across and just up from mine, and when he backed that Escalade out every morning, he backed out fast, swung wide across the bend, and cut the corner on my side before he straightened out and gunned it toward Route 9. He did it like the street belonged to him and the rest of us were furniture.

The first time he hit my cans I honestly thought it was an accident.