The asphalt was still warm when Mike got home. He stood in the street in front of his own house with his lunch cooler in one hand and looked at it for a long time.
Three days he'd been two towns over, laying a church parking lot with his crew, sleeping badly in a motel with a buzzing ice machine outside the door, and all three days, apparently, this had been happening here.
A strip of brand-new blacktop, ten feet wide and sixty feet long, ran down the side of his lot where his gravel drive had always run, and it did not stop where his gravel used to open into the parking pad behind the house.
It ran straight and smooth and finished, connecting his side yard to the Prescotts' driveway like the two had always been one property. Across the pad stood a fence.
Matte black metal, six feet tall, tight vertical bars, with a gate in the middle of it and a combination lock hanging from the gate like a punctuation mark. Behind the fence sat his sixteen-foot equipment trailer.
His trailer. The one with the plate compactor and the cut-off saws and the screed boards, the one he needed Monday morning and every working morning after that.
It sat on his own parking pad, behind another man's fence, with a fine gray dust of gravel settled over the deck and a wasp nest the size of a lemon starting under the tongue.
Mike walked the strip slowly, the way he'd walk any job he hadn't done himself, and the professional in him filed the insults in order. The mat was thin.
He could see it at the street edge where the new asphalt feathered out to meet the road: an inch and a half of mix laid over loose stone nobody had compacted, no saw cut, no base course worth the name. It would ravel by the first spring thaw.
It would crack along the cold joint where it met the Prescotts' real driveway. Whoever had laid it was somebody's brother-in-law with a rented roller and a free weekend.
It offended him as a paving man almost as much as it offended him as a homeowner, and he understood, standing there with the heat coming up off it in the late-August evening, that the two offenses were going to keep each other company for a while.
A sprinkler ticked two doors down. Somebody's dog barked once and thought better of it.
Mike took out his phone and photographed everything before he let himself feel anything else: the strip from the street, the fence, the lock, the trailer behind the bars, the fresh roller lines still faintly visible in the surface.
His father's voice, underneath everything since he was nineteen: document first, feel later. He took forty-one pictures.
Then he walked across the strip of asphalt, his asphalt whether they'd poured it or not, and knocked on the Prescotts' front door. Kayla answered with a wine glass in her hand.
White wine, bare feet, a linen shirt that had never once been within ten yards of a renovation, though renovation dust still hung in the air behind her and plastic sheeting bellied gently in the open doorway to the kitchen.
"Mike," she said, pleased, the way you'd greet a man delivering a package.
"Hi."
"Your husband paved my driveway," Mike said.
"We improved the side section."
She sipped.
"Brandon had it surveyed. That portion falls on our side."
"We just went ahead and improved it while the crew was here."
"Show me the survey."
"It's filed."
"Filed where?"
"Our contractor handled all of that."
She said it easily, like a woman reading a weather report for a town she didn't live in. "Permits, staking, all of it. That's what you pay people for."
"Then you won't mind emailing me a copy."
"Maybe check your own documents, Mike."
Her smile didn't move a millimeter.
"You might be surprised what you find."
He was still standing there deciding what to do with his hands when headlights swept the new asphalt and Brandon's SUV pulled into the Prescotts' side of the arrangement, tires whispering over the fresh surface.
Brandon came up the walk with his tie loosened and a garment bag over one shoulder, and he took in Mike on his porch the way a man takes in a weather change: noted, unwelcome, manageable.
"Problem here?" he said.
"Mike's upset about the driveway," Kayla said, in the tone of a translator who found both languages slightly ridiculous.
"There's no problem, Mike. We made permanent improvements to our property."
Brandon hung the garment bag on the porch hook with care.
"That is nine thousand four hundred dollars of new asphalt and fence. It's not coming up over a misunderstanding."
"It's not a misunderstanding," Mike said.
"It's my land. Sixty feet of it."
"That trailer behind your gate is my trailer, and it's sitting on my pad."
"According to your memory of where the line is."
"According to the county."
"Then the county can write me a letter."
Brandon smiled, and it was the smile from the spring, the salesman smile, the one that had never once reached anything behind his eyes.
"If you've got a problem, Mike, call a lawyer. That's what they're for."
Mike looked at the fence, black against the evening. He looked at his trailer behind it.
He made himself breathe the way he did before he bid a job he couldn't afford to lose.
"Forty-eight hours," he said.
"Take the fence down. Cut the asphalt out."
"Put my gravel back the way you found it. Forty-eight hours and this stays between us."
Brandon laughed. It was short and genuinely delighted, the laugh of a man who had been offered a bet he could not lose.
"Forty-eight hours. Okay, Mike."
Mike nodded once, as if something had been agreed, and walked home across the new blacktop, and Kate was standing on their own porch with her arms folded, watching him come.
"Well?" she said.
"He told me to call a lawyer."
Kate looked past him at the fence, at the gate, at the trailer sitting in its cage of black bars.
"Then I guess we call a lawyer," she said.
That night, after Ben's math homework and Maddie's long, theatrical shower, Mike got the accordion file down from the closet shelf and spread the purchase of his house across the kitchen table like a bid he was preparing to defend. Deed.
Plot map. The county's stamped survey from the year they'd bought the place, with the seal pressed into it like a coin.
Under his hand the papers made their small, dry sounds, and for a moment he wasn't looking at a dispute at all.
He was looking at the March they'd bought the place, Kate with Maddie in a carrier against her chest, the previous owners — an old couple who'd kept the gravel drive raked like a Zen garden — shaking his hand on the porch while he promised the house would stay kept.
He had bought this corner lot for the driveway. Other men fell for kitchens.
Mike had walked the wraparound drive with a contractor's eye and seen his whole working life in it: room to back a trailer at five in the morning without waking the street, a pad behind the house where the business could sleep.