"Your trailer break down on you, Mr. Sorensen?" the kid at the counter asked, sliding the clipboard across.
"Something like that," Mike said.
At the job site his foreman, Ray, looked at the rental unit and then at Mike and chose, wisely, to ask only one question.
"We billing this to the job?"
"We're billing it to the folder," Mike said.
"Every receipt. Every day."
"You got it."
Ray spat in the dust.
"Ninety-five dollars a day to rent what you already own. That's the most expensive fence in Michigan and it ain't even yours."
At noon Mike drove home for lunch the long way, on purpose, past his own house, and there his trailer sat behind the black bars with the wasps working at the nest under its tongue, forty feet from where he stood idling at the curb. He ate his sandwich in the truck.
Then he went back to work, because work was the one argument nobody could fence off, and the folder was not the only thing he intended to have ready when this was over.
Paula Lindgren came on Wednesday with a crew cab, a total station, and a rodman who said almost nothing and anticipated everything.
She was fiftyish, sun-lined, with a pencil behind one ear and the unhurried economy of a person whose whole profession was the distance between two points.
She found Mike's pins in the first twenty minutes — pulled the county control data, checked her coordinates twice — and then she shot the fence line every ten feet from the street to the back corner, calling numbers in a flat voice while the rodman wrote.
When she was done, she stood in the shade of Mike's garage with her field book open and read him the results like a diagnosis.
"The fence sits a full ten feet inside your land," she said.
"Ten feet at the street, ten feet one inch at the gate post, ten feet at the rear. Sixty feet of it."
"Call it six hundred square feet of your lot wearing their fence."
She turned a page.
"One more thing, smaller. Their new paver patio, the one along the back stretch — it crowds the line by about eight inches for a run of twelve feet."
"That's the kind of encroachment people apologize for over a fence with a beer in their hand. The fence and the asphalt are a different category of thing entirely."
"How different?"
"In twenty years I've never seen anyone pave first and measure never," Lindgren said.
"Not this boldly, anyway. Most people at least pretend to be confused afterward."
"Confused people call me before, Mr. Sorensen. These folks are going to have to call somebody after."
Before she packed up, her rodman set fresh lath at Mike's true corners, pink flagging tied bright against the late-summer grass, and Lindgren photographed her own markers from three angles.
"Those'll stand there until somebody moves them," she said.
"If somebody does move them, you call me before you call anybody else on earth. Disturbing a survey monument is one of the few things in my line of work that's an actual crime, and after twenty years I have run entirely out of sense of humor about it."
Her stamped report, with its drawing and its seal and its iron language of bearings and distances, cost Mike eighteen hundred and fifty dollars, and he paid it and put the receipt in the accordion file, which was becoming something more than a file.
Kate had started calling it the war chest. Dana Kowalski's office sat on Main Street in Hartley above the hardware store, up a staircase that smelled of floor wax and cut keys.
She was a plain-spoken woman in her fifties who read Mike's survey the way other people read the weather — once, thoroughly, with a pencil moving — and then looked up and said the sentence Mike would hold onto for months.
"This is the kind of survey that ends arguments. If we ever get in front of a judge, their lawyer is going to have a very short day."
"But a short day in court is still a day in court, and it's months from now, so hear this part too: what you cannot do is help yourself. No cutting that lock at midnight."
"No tearing up asphalt with your own machine, much as your hands itch. A Michigan judge remembers the last thing a man did louder than the first thing that was done to him."
"Right now, on paper, you are the most wronged man in Hartley Township. We are going to keep you that way, because wronged men with clean hands win."
She turned the drawing around and put one finger on the strip.
"Here's what we do first, because it's cheap and because the law likes a man who asked politely before he sued. A demand letter."
"My letterhead, the survey attached. Remove the fence and the asphalt, restore your gravel and your pad to the condition they found it in, reimburse your survey cost, fourteen days."
"Certified mail, and a copy to whatever lawyer they used when they bought the house, so there's no later claim that nobody told them."
"And if they don't?"
Mike said.
"Then we stop asking," Dana said, "and start filing. But understand me now, because I'll say it once and it'll still be true in November: courts do not move at the speed of insult."
"We can be right in August and still be waiting in February. That's not a flaw in your case."
"That's just the machinery. Can you live inside the machinery?"
"I've got a trailer I can't use and a business run out of this driveway," Mike said.
"I'll live where I have to."
The fourteen days had their own texture.
The Prescotts used the strip the way you'd use a thing you'd paid for, which, Mike supposed, in a narrow sense they had: Brandon parked his SUV on the new asphalt squarely in front of the gate; Kayla hosted her brokerage colleagues there on Thursdays — women in clean shoes with glossy folders, standing on Mike's pad with glasses of wine, admiring the parking.
The house was not for sale yet. But it was being rehearsed, Mike understood, the way you rehearse a room before the photographer comes.
Mike photographed it every morning from his porch with his coffee going cold, and every evening, and said nothing, and waved at the clients when they caught him looking, because Dana had told him: be the most reasonable man on the street, on the record, every single day.
It cost him more than the survey did. The Prescotts' answer arrived on day twelve, on paper thick enough to have opinions of its own.
Their lawyer wrote of the "longstanding shared use of the side-yard area by successive owners of both parcels," of "acquiescence and laches," and of their clients' "adverse possession in fact of the disputed strip."
Dana read it in her office with Mike sitting across the desk, and about halfway down the second page she began, unmistakably, to smile.
"They bought the house in April," she said.
"Four months ago. Adverse possession in Michigan takes fifteen years, Mike."
"Fifteen. And shared use requires the use to have been shared, not seized while the owner was paving a church lot two towns over."