Mike looked at the fence a moment longer — at the blacktop shining dully beyond it, at the ground underneath that had been his the whole time, through every letter and logger and lie of it, patient as dirt.
"Tomorrow we just move a line back where it always was," he said.
They finished their coffee standing there, father and son, while the light went out over Hickory Lane.
The deputy arrived a little before seven with a travel mug in one hand and a folded copy of the court order in the other, and he read the order standing in the street while his breath smoked in the cold, the way a man reads a weather report he already believes.
Hartley in mid-November, an hour after sunrise: the light was the thin gray-gold kind that comes off frost, and every lawn on Hickory Lane wore a white crust that would be gone by ten.
Paula Lindgren's survey stakes still stood along the true line, their pink flagging stiff with rime, patient as fence posts. Mike had walked past them for three months without touching them.
This morning he stopped beside the first one and put his gloved hand flat on top of it, the way you might rest a hand on a dog's head, and then he went to get his saw.
He had gone to the storage lot at first light and hauled the work trailer home behind the dump truck, and it sat now at the curb with its ramps down, waiting for its pad like a dog that knows the sound of its own dish.
His two men were already there, stamping their feet, thermoses in hand, and Earl Novak had come out in his bathrobe over a parka with a mug of his own, because Earl had announced on Thursday, to anyone at the diner who would listen, that he would not miss this for a paid ticket to anything.
"You want us to start at the fence or the cut?" his foreman asked.
"The cut," Mike said.
"Everything starts at the line. That's the whole point of the day."
The saw was a walk-behind with a diamond blade and a water feed, and when it bit into the Prescotts' asphalt the sound went up the street like a zipper being pulled on the whole neighborhood. Mike ran it himself.
He had thought about that — whether it would look like gloating, running the saw himself — and had decided it didn't matter how it looked, because it was his hand that should do it, the same way it would have been his hand to hire out if the court had gone the other way.
The blade followed the stakes, wet slurry fanning out gray on the black surface, and the cut went down the full sixty feet of the stolen strip in one long, unhurried pass, straight as a plumb line, ten feet inside what had been his own driveway since before the Prescotts had ever heard of Hickory Lane.
Behind the saw the asphalt stood in two countries. On the street side of the cut: his.
On the house side: theirs, what was left of it, a neat black tongue of pavement that now ended exactly where it should have ended in August. Brandon came out onto his porch when the saw started and he stayed there.
He wore a fleece pullover and he folded his arms and he watched, and his face did the thing Mike had seen it do in the courtroom — it arranged itself into the expression of a man observing weather, something happening at a distance that did not concern him personally.
Only his hands, tucked up under his arms, kept tightening. Mike saw it once and looked away on purpose.
A man is allowed to watch his nine thousand four hundred dollars come up off the ground without an audience studying his hands. The fence came next.
The black metal sections were good fence, Mike would give them that — powder-coated, heavy, the posts set in concrete sleeves because whoever installed it had known his business.
His men unbolted the panels one at a time and carried them, two men to a section, across the strip and across the true line and stacked them flat and square on the Prescotts' own lawn, with the hardware bagged and twist-tied to the top panel, and Mike heard himself say, "Stack them neat. They're his," in the same tone he used for a customer's gate or a customer's anything, because neatness was not a courtesy he extended to people he liked.
It was just how work was done. The post sleeves took longer — the concrete had to be broken out and the holes backfilled and tamped, and by then the street had begun, quietly, to populate itself.
Not a crowd. Hickory Lane did not do crowds.
But there were figures at the ends of driveways with coffee, and a woman walking a small dog at a pace that suggested the dog was in no hurry whatsoever, and Mrs. Kowalski from the corner, who had brought out a folding chair and a travel mug and set herself up on her own apron like a woman at a parade she intended to review afterward.
Kayla appeared once, at the tall window beside their front door, in the middle of the morning.
She stood behind the glass with a phone in her hand, not raised, just held, and she looked out at the strip of her side yard coming apart in slabs and at her husband on the porch not stopping it, and then the curtain moved — she had moved it, or it settled — and she was gone, and Mike found he was sorry about that in a way he had not expected to be.
Not sorry for the day. Sorry the way you are sorry at any ending that has to happen in front of windows.
The skid steer peeled the asphalt in slabs. That was the part Mike had laid awake rehearsing, and it was nothing like the rehearsal: it was slower, and louder, and more ordinary.
The bucket slid under the cut edge and the whole first slab — ten feet wide and four feet long, four inches thick, a ton of blacktop — lifted with a sound like a boot coming out of mud and tipped into the dump trailer and broke in half on the way down.
Underneath it was his old gravel, still there, compacted and stained dark where their cars had sat all fall, and the sight of it did something to his chest that anger never had. It was his.
It had been his under there the whole time, under their cars and their fence and their certainty, just waiting with the patience of dirt. Slab by slab it came back into the light.
The Prescotts' guests' tire marks, the oil freckling from a caterer's van, a bottle cap, a child's lost hair ribbon, pink, that Mike picked out of the gravel with two fingers and set on the curb without thinking, the way you set aside anything that isn't yours to throw away.
At noon Kate came out with coffee in the big steel pot and a tray of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, and she fed the crew and she fed Earl, and she offered the deputy a sandwich with exactly the same face she offered everyone, and the deputy said coffee only, ma'am, but thank you, and she refilled his travel mug from the pot like it was nothing.