The chain binders, cold enough to sting his palms.
The eighteen minutes of two-lane highway between Hartley Self-Storage out by the bypass and the neighborhood where he actually lived, which he drove twice a day now, morning and evening, burning fuel and daylight so that Brandon and Kayla Prescott could park on his land.
He did the arithmetic the way he did everything, without wanting to.
Four hundred and fifty dollars a month for Lot 14, a rectangle of crushed stone inside a chain-link fence, big enough for the trailer, the skid steer, the plate compactor, and the pallets he used to keep on the pad beside his own garage.
Twelve steps from his back door, that pad had been. He had poured it himself the second summer after they bought the house, him and Frank, his father running the transit out of old habit and saying a man should be able to stand on his own work and have it be level.
Now the pad sat behind eight feet of black metal fence on the Prescott side of the line, holding Kayla's planters and, most evenings, Brandon's SUV, parked square in the middle of it like a dog on a rug it had stolen.
Eighteen fifty to Paula Lindgren for the survey that proved what he already knew. A retainer to Dana Kowalski that he did not say out loud anymore.
Four fifty a month for the lot. And the hours — the hours were the part that didn't show up on any invoice and the part that was actually breaking him.
Peak season in Michigan ran from the first thaw to Thanksgiving if you were lucky, and every paving contractor between here and the lake was booked out six weeks.
Mike had a church lot in Hartley, a diner resurface two townships over, three residential driveways, and a standing promise to the senior center that he was starting to do math on in the dark. Every job cost him the drive to the lot, the load, the drive back.
Every morning started forty minutes behind where it should have started. His two men stood around drinking gas-station coffee while he wrestled the gate.
Twice in one week he had turned down work — good work, a farm lane and a small commercial lot — because there were only so many hours of light and he was spending them commuting to his own equipment.
He got the skid steer chained down and stood for a moment with his thermos, watching the sky go the color of wet concrete over the bypass. His phone buzzed.
Kate, awake with Ben's lunchbox shift. Lot rent clears tomorrow, she'd written.
Don't let me forget. He typed back a thumbs-up because anything longer would have turned into the other conversation, the one they were both being careful not to have before six in the morning.
The drive home in the evening was worse than the drive out. In the morning the lot was just logistics.
In the evening he came down Hickory Lane at the end of a ten-hour day, sun in his eyes, shoulders full of asphalt dust, and there it was: the new black fence, the new blacktop strip — ten feet wide, sixty feet long, smooth as a showroom floor — running down the side of his house where his gravel used to be, and at the end of it, his pad, with planters on it.
Kayla had put out pots of something purple. She had a good eye, he'd give her that.
It looked intentional. It looked like it had always been theirs.
That was the part that got under his skin and stayed there, worse than the money: the sheer finished quality of the theft, the way it photographed, the way a stranger driving down the street would see one clean, continuous, expensive-looking driveway and never know any of it had been taken.
"You're looking at it again," Kate said from the porch, the first night of that week, with the screen door propped on her hip and a dish towel over her shoulder.
"I'm parking," Mike said.
"You're parking and looking at it."
She said it without heat. Kate had a nurse's aide's daughter's upbringing — no, she had twenty years of dispatch and school offices and PTA behind her, and she'd learned to say true things in a tone that didn't ask for a fight.
"Supper's in ten. Wash the day off first."
He washed his hands at the spigot by the garage, the way he always did, black crescents under the nails that never entirely came out in summer.
Through the fence slats he could hear the Prescotts' patio — glasses, low music, Kayla laughing at something at the exact pitch of a woman who has never once worried about being overheard.
He thought about the township violation notice folded in the folder on Dana's desk, the one with no teeth in it yet. He thought about the injunction hearing set for October, which Dana described as soon, in lawyer time, a unit of measurement he was learning to convert.
He dried his hands and went in to supper and asked Ben about soccer and did not look at the fence again until the dishes were done. The street had started taking sides by then, quietly, the way streets do — not with speeches but with groceries and eye contact.
At the diner on Main, where Mike had eaten breakfast at the counter since he was nineteen, Earl Novak held court most mornings from the corner booth, seventy-some years old, retired off a road crew, with hands like rope and a memory like a plat book.
Earl had lived on Hickory Lane since before there was much of a Hickory Lane, and he had opinions about the fence.
"I watched them plat that subdivision," Earl announced to the counter generally, the Tuesday after the township notice went out, with Mike two stools down pretending to read the menu he'd had memorized for twenty years.
"Nineteen eighty-four. I was on the crew that graded the road cut before they ever sold a lot."
"Survey boys came through in the spring, set the pins with a transit and a chain, same as anybody. I remember your lot special, Mike, because it's the corner and the line takes that little jog at the back."
"Those pins went in where they went in, and they don't move because a fella in a nice shirt would like them to."
"Earl," somebody said, "nobody's saying they moved."
"Brandon Prescott is saying exactly that, with asphalt."
Earl turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, the way he did when he was settling in. "Man paves over another man's ground and puts a fence on it — where I come from that has a name, and the name isn't 'renovation.'" There was a murmur that could have been agreement or could have been men chewing.
Not everybody at the counter was on Mike's side, and that was its own education.
The man two stools past Earl — a decent man, a man Mike had sealcoated a driveway for in June — shrugged into his eggs and said what a version of half the street was saying: "It's gravel, though. End of the day."
"I just hate to see neighbors go to war over gravel."