Brandon appeared behind her with a drink of his own and an expression already arranged into mild inconvenience, the way a man arranges a napkin.
"Mike. Hey."
"It's just for a few hours."
He gestured vaguely with the glass, at the street, at the cars, at the general arithmetic of hospitality.
"We've got limited space tonight. Everybody's doubling up."
"You understand."
"I understand you've got your driveway," Mike said.
"And your curb. That car's on mine."
"You've got plenty of driveway," Brandon said, and smiled.
"That's kind of the famous thing about your driveway. There's room for a small airport."
A laugh went up somewhere behind him in the house, at something else, and he half turned toward it, already done, and then — lightly, almost as an afterthought, the way a man drops a business card into a fishbowl — he said, "Although. Your driveway does extend pretty far over toward our side, when you look at it."
"Are you sure where the line actually is?"
The question sat there in the doorway between the party noise and the June evening.
"I'm sure," Mike said.
"Okay," Brandon said, in the tone of a man writing something down mentally.
"Okay. Somebody'll move the car."
Somebody did, forty minutes later, after the car had sat through the whole of Mike's shower and half his meatloaf, and it was moved not with apology but with the theatrical weariness of a favor performed under duress.
But the question stayed with Mike after he'd gone to bed, lying in the dark next to Kate's breathing, because it hadn't been a question. Questions seek information.
That had been an announcement wearing a question's clothes: I have begun to think about your line, and I have decided to think about it in a way that ends with some of it being mine. The cones came a week later.
Mike came home at four-thirty on a Tuesday and found three orange traffic cones standing in a row on his own gravel apron — his gravel, the side run he'd graded two weeks before — spaced at tidy intervals along a line that existed nowhere on any map of Alder County: the line Brandon Prescott had apparently decided the property boundary ought to be, running a good eight feet inside Mike's actual lot, clipping the entire side section of the driveway into Prescott territory.
The cones were new. They were clean.
They had reflective collars. A man doesn't have three brand-new traffic cones in his garage by accident; a man buys them, for a purpose, from a catalog.
Mike got out of the truck and stood looking at them for a good thirty seconds. Somewhere a sprinkler ticked.
He thought about Frank, forty years of other people's boundary disputes, saying: The day a man marks your land is not the day he takes it. It's the day he finds out whether you'll let him.
He picked up the cones one at a time, carried them across the actual line — his line, the iron pins, the deed, the plat sketch taped inside his toolbox lid — and set them down gently on the Prescotts' new sod. Not thrown.
Set down, in a row, as neatly as they'd been set on his gravel. Then he went inside and started the grill.
Brandon knocked inside of ten minutes. He had the air of a man who had rehearsed in the mirror and been pleased with the rehearsal.
"I see you found the cones," he said.
"I found them," Mike said.
"I put them back."
"Mike."
A patient smile.
"Here's what we're thinking. That side section of your driveway — functionally, it's an access strip."
"It runs right along our house. When we host, when family comes, we need overflow parking, and honestly, you've got all that depth back there by the garage."
"Shared access just makes sense for both properties. It's what a well-run street does."
"It's not shared," Mike said.
"It's deeded. To me."
"It's in my deed in words of one syllable."
"We had a guy take a look," Brandon said, "when we bought. A survey guy."
"And his read was, that stretch actually falls within our boundary. The old surveys on this street are a mess, Mike."
"Half of them were done with chains in the snow. There's real ambiguity here."
"Then show me the survey."
"It's being finalized."
Brandon said it smoothly, the way he'd clearly said it before, in other doorways, about other documents.
"These things take time. There's a backlog."
"Then you don't have one," Mike said.
The smile left. It didn't slide away; it was removed, like a sign taken down, and what was underneath it was the face Brandon wore when there was no audience he cared about: flat, assessing, faintly surprised that the furniture was arguing.
"We'll see about that," he said.
"We will," Mike said, and closed the door at the speed of courtesy, which is not fast, and stood in his own hallway with his hand still on the knob, hearing his father's voice again, older this time, and tired around the edges: A man who marks your land with cones has already priced the fence.
The Fourth of July on Hickory Lane was a street party by long tradition — Gus's flag upgraded to a full fireworks budget, folding tables in driveways, a grill the size of a bathtub that the Hartigans two doors down owned and everybody pretended was communal.
The Prescotts hosted their end of the street that year, because of course they did, and they hosted it the way they did everything: catered trays under tented card tables, citronella torches in a row like an airport runway, a printed sign by the cooler that said HYDRATION STATION.
Brandon held court by the grill he hadn't lit — the caterer had brought his own — and told two men from down the street, loudly and happily, that when the renovations were all done, "this block is going to be unrecognizable. In a good way."
"Values follow vision, that's all it is. Values follow vision."
Mike, carrying a tray of Kate's deviled eggs past the Prescott driveway, noticed Kayla up on their porch with her phone raised, taking a slow panoramic video of the street — the party, the flags, the houses.
The pan moved across 812 and stopped, for just a moment, on his driveway. On the truck.
On the trailer in its row.
She lowered the phone with the satisfied air of a listing agent gathering the good angle, and Mike set the eggs down and told himself it was for the brokerage page, because that was the explanation that let a man eat a hamburger in peace at his own street party.
"You've got the face," Kate said, arriving beside him with two paper plates.
"I don't have a face."
"You've got the face you get at the mailbox. The arithmetic face."
She handed him a plate.
"Eat the hamburger, Michael. Whatever he's building over there, he's not building it today."
She was right, and the hamburgers were good, and Ben won the sparkler championship of Hickory Lane by the controversial method of holding four at once, and for one whole evening Mike almost believed the summer could be survived on politeness and property pins.