Through the front window Mike could see them: six or seven of the gala crowd, the ones who'd stayed over in the Prescotts' guest rooms, standing in a loose crescent on the concrete in the bright morning, holding coffee cups and overnight bags, looking at the empty street and the empty mouth of Mike's driveway the way people look at a stage after the set has been struck.
A woman in a cocktail dress and a man's blazer kept walking to the curb and back, phone in hand, as if the cars might be parked one street over and she simply hadn't spotted them yet. A tall man in a wrinkled suit was doing slow arithmetic on his fingers.
They found the cards a few minutes later.
Mike had printed them himself, forty of them, on plain white stock: DELGADO TOWING, the lot's address out by the highway, the phone number, hours seven to seven, and two lines of text — Vehicles towed from private property, Hickory Lane, under posted notice.
Photo log and vehicle condition report available at the lot. Bring photo ID and registration.
He'd asked Ray to leave a stack under the Prescotts' front-door mat before the trucks pulled out, because whatever else the morning was going to be, the guests were not the enemy, and nobody deserved to start a Sunday believing his car had been stolen.
Brandon came out in a bathrobe. Even from across two lawns, Mike could see the exact moment the robe registered the street, the driveway, the mat, the card in his wife's hand.
Kayla stood in the doorway behind him in her real-estate clothes already, phone at her ear, and Brandon read the card twice and then did what Mike, in his heart, had known he would do, which was go very loud, very fast, in the direction of the largest available audience.
"THEFT!" he shouted, at the street in general, and then, spotting Mike's front door opening — Mike had decided he would not hide inside his own house for this — "YOU! YOU STOLE EIGHT CARS!"
"I had eight cars towed off my driveway," Mike said, from his own porch, at normal volume.
"The lot's address is on the card. They open at seven."
"That's grand theft, that's — Kayla, call the police! He stole our guests' cars in the middle of the night like a — like a criminal!"
The police, as it happened, did not need calling so much as they needed waving over.
The township officer from the night before had rolled back down Hickory Lane at seven-fifteen as a courtesy, at Ray's suggestion, and he parked at the curb now and got out with the patience of a man who had read the folder and slept on it.
Brandon met him halfway across the street with the card crumpled in his fist and the whole story coming out at prosecution speed, and the officer let him finish, which took a while, and then said, in the even voice of a man reading weather: "Sir, your driveway and your neighbor's driveway are two different properties. His is posted."
"It's been posted since September second — I saw the photographs of the signs last night, with timestamps. You signed a certified letter on September third acknowledging the notice."
"Every vehicle removed was photographed where it sat and logged, and the log matches what I observed. This is what a tow-away zone means, sir."
"The cars aren't stolen. They're impounded, and the lot opens at seven."
"One eighty-five a car," one of the guests said faintly, reading the card over Kayla's shoulder.
"Plus storage. He can't — " "He can," the officer said.
"It's his driveway."
Brandon said several things after that that Ben would repeat at the dinner table for a week in an awestruck whisper, and Kayla stopped mid-phone-call and stared at her husband the way you stare at a listing photo you suddenly realize is of the wrong house.
But the sound that settled over Hickory Lane that morning wasn't Brandon. It was doors.
Porch doors up and down the street, opening. People coming out with coffee.
People standing at the ends of their own driveways, watching the president of nothing, in his bathrobe, learn the difference between his and not his — and Mike, watching their faces, understood that the lane had been waiting all summer for somebody to say it out loud.
The showings were scheduled for ten and eleven-thirty. The ten o'clock couple arrived at five to, a pair in their thirties with a folder of printouts and the bright, doomed optimism of people who have fallen for a listing.
They got out of their car into a street containing one shouting homeowner in a bathrobe, one marked patrol car, a dispersing crowd of furious gala guests waiting on rides to a tow lot by the highway, and Earl Novak, eighty years old and resident of the house across from the Prescotts for forty-six years, who had positioned himself on his porch with a folding chair and a thermos and was narrating, free of charge, to anyone within earshot: the fence, the survey, the pins, the lawsuit, the girl surveyor who'd found the iron markers with a little metal wand while the other fellow stood there turning the color of a plum.
"That's the driveway in the pictures, the wide one," Earl told the couple, helpfully, jabbing a thumb.
"Except it ain't theirs. It's his."
Jab.
"Whole thing's in court. You'd be buying a lawsuit with a pool."
The couple's folder closed. They were polite — showings people always are — but they did not go inside, and their car left Hickory Lane at the unhurried speed of people recalculating a mortgage.
The eleven-thirty buyer didn't come at all.
His agent called Kayla from the car, and whatever he said into her ear made her sit down slowly on her own front step, in the middle of the wreckage of her Sunday, with her phone in her lap and her perfect listing smile nowhere on her face.
Mike spent Sunday afternoon at Ray's lot out by the highway, signing release paperwork at a folding table in the bay while the gala came back, two and three at a time, to reclaim its cars. It was a strange procession.
A man in a pink polo shirt paid the hundred and eighty-five dollars with the air of a fellow settling a bar tab in a town he never intended to visit again.
The woman in the cocktail dress, now in jeans, her blazer folded over her arm, argued for exactly one minute about storage — none had accrued; the forty-dollar day rate started Monday — and then paid with a sigh that seemed to come from her shoes.
The tall man with the wrinkled suit stood in the doorway of the office a long moment, looking at the photograph of his own car on Mike's log page, mirrors nearly touching its neighbor's, and then did something Mike had not expected and would think about for weeks afterward.
"For what it's worth," the man said, "we all thought it was his driveway. He stood there at dinner telling us where to park."
"'Plenty of room, use the whole drive.' Those were his words."
He shook his head slowly.
"I suppose that's the difference between a man and a — well. I'm sorry for my part in it."
"You parked where your host told you to park," Mike said.