The Game Day I Towed Them All

What happened over the next forty minutes I will remember when I am ninety.

Donnie and his cousin and the third man went down the line of those cars like men who do this every day, because they do. Hook, winch, lift, chain. The first car, a silver sedan, went up on the hook with that groan they make, and a stranger came running out of the garage yelling, “Hey! Hey, that’s my car!”

“It surely is,” Donnie said, not unkind, writing on his clipboard. “And it’s on this lady’s private property without her permission. You can pick it up at the yard on Route 9. Hundred and fifty, cash or card, we open at noon.”

“But I paid to park here!”

“You paid him,” Donnie said, and he pointed his pen at my son, standing there in his socks. “That’s between you and him.”

And oh, the faces. One by one the owners came running from wherever they had got to, and one by one they learned there is no refund on a thing you were never sold.

Pruett, the beer man, the one who had been in my irises the first morning, came out hollering, and when he understood his truck was going up the hook he turned on Denny. “You said this was legit! You said it was your lot!”

“It’s my driveway,” Denny said, weak, and Pruett said a word I will not put in here and got in another man’s car to ride out to the yard.

Tuck Mahan did not even wait to see his own car towed. He just left it. He got in with somebody and he was gone.

I watched my son watch his best friend of twenty-four years leave him standing in the driveway, and for the first time that morning I felt it, the thing I had been holding off. The hurt of it. Because that is still my boy out there.

Jolene came out onto her porch with her own coffee and watched the whole thing with her mouth slightly open, and when the flatbed pulled away with the last two cars she caught my eye across the yards and gave me one small nod, the kind that says, I saw it, it happened, you are not making it up.

The yellow lights went off up the street one by one. The music had stopped a while ago. Somebody had unplugged the Bluetooth speaker and taken it with them.

And then it was quiet in a way my driveway had not been quiet on a game day in two months.

Just me on the steps. My son in the middle of all that empty concrete in his sock feet. And Dale’s truck sideways across the mouth of the drive, the morning sun finally hitting the robin’s-egg blue of it.