The Game Day I Towed Them All

I would come out my own front door on a Saturday and a stranger would wave me back like I was in the way. In the way. On my own steps.

One time a young fellow in a Weller cap actually said to me, “Ma’am, you can’t stand there, that’s a spot,” and Denny did not correct him. Denny just said, “Ma, you want to maybe watch from the porch.”

I went inside and I stood at my sink and I looked out at nine cars that did not belong to me, on grass my husband had seeded, and I counted.

Nine cars. Forty dollars. That is three hundred and sixty dollars in that tackle box, and not one dollar of it was ever going to touch my hand, and I had not been asked one single time.

I am not a woman who yells. I want that understood. In forty-one years of marriage Dale and I raised our voices at each other maybe four times, and I remember all four, that is how rare it was.

So I did not yell. I tried the reasonable way first, the way you are supposed to, the way everybody tells you to.

I said, “Denny, I would like my driveway back. I don’t like strangers on the place. I don’t like the drinking. And if there is money being made off this house I think we should talk about it.”

He was tired. He had worked a short week and I know he was scared about money, I did know that, even then. But what he said was:

“Ma, it’s three Saturdays left in the season. Can you just let me have this one thing. You’ve got the whole rest of the year. These spots are rented out already, so can you just take the Buick down to the Methodist lot those mornings.”

Take the Buick down to the Methodist lot. Those mornings.

He wanted me to go park somewhere else so he could rent my driveway to strangers.

I looked at my boy for a long moment, and I did not say anything, and that is the exact minute I stopped trying the reasonable way.

Because here is a thing I know that Denny had forgotten. I did not spend twenty-six years in a co-op office being decorative. I know how to make a plan and I know how to make a call, and I know the difference between a woman who is upset and a woman who has decided.

I did not slam a door. I did not cry where he could see it. I washed the supper dishes and I dried them and I put them up, and then I went in the back bedroom and I called Donnie Vance.

Donnie runs Vance Towing out on Route 9. He went to high school with Denny, two grades up.