"Three: documentation. Every blockage photographed, timestamped, logged — date, time, plate, how long, what it cost you."
"Four: before any tow, ever, you call the township police non-emergency line and inform them. Every time, no exceptions."
"Five: you use a licensed operator and you let the operator do his job — you do not touch a vehicle yourself, you do not supervise from the hood, you watch from your porch like a man drinking coffee."
"Ray Delgado," Mike said.
"Ray Delgado is licensed, bonded, and has been towing in this county for twenty years without a single complaint that stuck, which is more than I can say for most of his industry. I already like him."
Dana leaned on the desk.
"And hear me on the spirit of it, not just the letter. One inch out of line and you're the story."
"Not them — you. The headline writes itself: paving contractor, feud, cars towed, chaos."
"We do this like surveyors, Mike. Exact."
"A line on the ground, a paper for every step, and your hands clean enough to eat off. Can you be that patient?"
"I've been patient since August."
"You've been enduring since August. Patience is different."
"Patience is a plan."
He put the signs up on the second of September, a Tuesday evening after work, with Ben holding the level and reading the bubble like it was a instrument of national importance.
Two signs, heavy gauge, reflective white on red, mounted on steel posts he set in concrete — one at the apron where the drive met the street, one halfway up beside the maple. He photographed them from the street, from the drive, from the Prescotts' side of the line.
He photographed the post holes and the wet concrete.
When Kate came out with two glasses of iced tea and stood reading the sign — VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED AT OWNER'S EXPENSE — she said, "It looks like a parking garage sign."
"Good," Mike said.
"Nobody ever says they didn't understand a parking garage sign."
The certified letter went out the same afternoon, and the green return-receipt card came back on the fourth with Brandon Prescott's signature scrawled across it, dated September 3.
Mike put it in the kitchen drawer, in the folder he'd started keeping there — the drawer folder, Kate called it, separate from Dana's legal file, his own record: the receipt, the sign photographs, the logbook he'd bought at the office supply store, its first pages already ruled off in his draftsman's hand with columns for date, time, vehicle, plate, duration, action taken.
Brandon's answer came that same evening, and it came in person, though not at the door.
Mike was in the garage with the door up, sharpening mower blades for a side job, when he heard Brandon's SUV roll in next door — and keep rolling, past the Prescotts' own drive, nosing in a slow, deliberate arc until it sat half across the apron of 812, blocking the Sorensen driveway at an angle that had nothing accidental in it anywhere.
Brandon got out, looked at the new sign for a long moment, and laughed — a short, carrying laugh, performed for the audience of one he knew was in the garage.
"Kayla," he called, loud, toward his own front door, "he put up signs. He's bluffing."
"Paper signs. You watch — it's all theater for his lawyer."
He went inside. The SUV stayed.
It stayed through Kate's meatloaf. It stayed through Ben's homework at the kitchen table, visible through the front window like a piece of furniture nobody had bought.
Five minutes, Mike wrote in the logbook, at 6:05 p.m., in the column under Duration, and then, because the column required honesty, he crossed nothing out and simply kept writing: still there 7:00. Still there 8:15.
At 9:10, after three hours, Brandon came out in socks with a beer in his hand, got in, and backed the SUV ten feet onto his own land with the air of a man who had made his point at his leisure.
Mike photographed all of it from the porch — wide shots, close shots, the plate, the sign in frame with the bumper under it. He did not go out.
He did not call Ray. He sat at the kitchen table with Kate while the dishwasher ran and she watched him write the last entry.
"You could have," she said.
"I know."
"Three hours, Mike."
"I know what time it was. I wrote it down."
He closed the logbook.
"Dana's right, and worse than that, he's right — if I'd towed his own car off the apron tonight, first move, it stops being about the law and starts being about me wanting to. It's a feud then."
"I can wait until it's a guest car or the tenth time or whatever it is, with the paper so thick nobody can breathe on it. He signed the receipt, Kate."
"He stood in my driveway and read the sign out loud to his wife. Whatever happens next, he's the one who chose it with his eyes open."
"That's the coldest thing I've ever heard you say," Kate said, and then, after a moment, "It's also probably the smartest. Lord help us both."
September ground on the way August had, only with the logbook filling. Friday the twelfth, Kayla hosted her book club — nine women, four cars that didn't fit at 816, two of them nosed onto Mike's drive at the apron.
Ninety minutes. Photographed, logged, no tow; one of the women, backing out, mouthed sorry at him through the windshield, and he nodded at her like a gentleman, because she wasn't the enemy and it cost him nothing to know it.
The following Thursday, a showing at 816 — the Prescotts' agent brought buyers through in the middle of the afternoon, and the agent's own sedan sat squarely across the mouth of Mike's drive for the full forty minutes of the tour, which happened to be the same forty minutes the stone supplier's truck arrived with two pallets of pavers Mike had ordered dropped at his garage.
The driver idled at the curb for five minutes, looked at the blocked drive, looked at the NO PARKING sign, shook his head, and turned away down Hickory Lane with his load still strapped.
Mike paid a redelivery fee of a hundred and forty dollars for the privilege of having his own materials refused at his own street. He wrote that in the logbook too, in the cost column, and underlined it once.
Kate had taken over the office work in September — the invoicing, the scheduling calls, the delicate business of moving clients a week this way or that without letting them hear the strain.
She did it at the kitchen table after her own shifts with a pencil behind her ear, and she never once, in Mike's hearing, said the words if you'd just.
What she said, one night, closing the laptop, was, "We're not behind. We're thin, but we're not behind."
"There's a difference and I need you to know it."
He had looked up from the logbook and understood that she was giving him the thing she could give, which was solid ground to stand on at home, and that it was not a small thing.