Our trailer was eleven inches inside our own line. Not over. Inside.
I did not read the number out loud. I just looked at it, and then I rolled the tape back up, and I said, “Okay, Oren. Let’s get you parked first. We’ll sort the camper out later.”
He looked at me like I had slapped him. I think he wanted me to argue. If I had argued, he could have kept being right in front of everybody. Instead he put the truck in drive, pulled forward, and tried it again.
He missed the turn the second time too. Not by much. Reggie Carney from three sites down jogged over and stood at the back corner and spotted him in, and Oren took every one of Reggie’s hand signals without a word, and that was strange, because Oren never let anybody spot him.
When he finally got the engine off, he climbed down from the cab, walked past the dent without looking at it, and went inside his fifth wheel and shut the door.
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Our daughter, Delia, who is nine, had been at the picnic table on the far side of our camper with a coloring book. She had come around the back end at the first crunch and seen the whole thing.
She looked at me and said, very quietly, “Grandpa didn’t see it, Mom. He was looking right at it and he didn’t see it.”
I told her to finish her picture. But I thought about that sentence the rest of the afternoon.
Where Eric was
My husband, Eric, had gone into town with Reggie’s son to fill propane bottles and get ice. They came back an hour later with the bed of the truck full of bags of ice and two full forty pound tanks, and Eric saw the side of the camper before he even got the truck in park.
He walked around it twice. He ran his hand along the crease. Then he looked at me, and I could see him decide not to ask me in front of anybody.
He went and knocked on his father’s door instead. I heard them through the screen. Oren told it the same way he told the row. I was over the line.
I had crowded him. He had told me so. Eric said, “Dad, Cassie parks buses for a living,” and Oren said, “Then she ought to know better.”
Eric came back out with his jaw tight. He sat down next to me at the fire ring, out of earshot of everybody, and said, “Tell me what happened. All of it.”
So I did. I told him about the tape measure and the eleven inches. I told him about the second miss, and Reggie spotting him in, and Oren taking the signals like a man taking directions in a strange town.
“He’s embarrassed,” Eric said. “He’ll come around. And his insurance will cover it. He hit us. It’s not complicated.”
“It is complicated,” I said. “I think his eyes are going.”
Eric looked at me for a long time. Then he looked at the fifth wheel, where the lights had come on behind the shades even though the sun was barely down.
“His eyes are fine,” he said. “He’d tell me.”
“Would he?” I said. “If he told you his eyes were bad, what’s the first thing you’d do?”
Eric did not answer, because we both knew. He would take the keys. He is a good son and a careful man, and he would have taken the keys that same night, and he would have been right to.