He listened. I couldn't hear what she said. Marcus went back to checking the lift points, professional, like nothing was happening. Tyler listened some more, then looked at me, and I could see the message traveling from her mouth through his ear into his face. He didn't say anything else. He just stood there holding the phone, watching Marcus work.
Meredith Vaughn arrived the way she arrives everywhere: like the place had been waiting for her. I heard the SUV before I saw it, a big engine with that smooth expensive sound, and then it pulled up across the street and she got out and came marching down the sidewalk like she owned the concrete. She had on the cream blouse and the gold bracelet. The makeup was perfect, same as every morning I'd ever seen her, and the blonde hair was done up even though it wasn't nine o'clock yet. Tyler had called her maybe ten minutes earlier. She must have thrown on clothes and run.
She walked straight past Marcus, straight past the tow truck, and stopped in front of me with her hands on her hips.
"He's harassing my son," she said, loud enough for the whole street. No hello. No name. Just that.
I didn't answer right away. I was thinking about the fact that she was talking to me like I was the one who'd parked a Mercedes across her garage door twenty-four times. The camera monitor was still running on my shelf, and I made a note to save the audio on this clip. Twenty years as a mechanic had taught me that people remember conversations the way they wish they'd happened. My father had the saying for it: never argue with memory. Write it down.
"Ma'am," Marcus said, "I'm a licensed tow operator. This vehicle is blocking an active business driveway. The owner has a filed report."
She didn't even look at him. "This is a neighborhood, not a junkyard. My son was parked for a few minutes and this man has decided to make an example of him."
"A few minutes," I said. "For the twenty-fourth time."
She turned to me then, and her face did something I hadn't seen before. The perfect makeup cracked a little around the mouth. "You'll regret this," she said.
I believed her. Not in the way she meant it, maybe, but I believed she was capable of making me regret things. People with her kind of money and her kind of certainty have a way of turning life sideways for people like me. But I also believed that if I backed down right there, with the tow truck idling and Tyler standing on my sidewalk with his phone in his hand, I'd be having this same conversation next week, and the week after, for the rest of my life.
"I've given you twenty-three chances," I said. "This is number twenty-four. You don't get to count one more."
She took a step closer. The gold bracelet caught the sun and threw a little spark. "You're going to pay for this," she said, quieter this time, which was worse. "You don't know who you're dealing with."
"Probably," I said.
Marcus cleared his throat. It was the sound of a man who had done this exact job in front of this exact kind of standoff a hundred times before, and who had learned that the machine is the only thing that doesn't take sides. He walked to the rear of the truck, lowered the wheel-lift, and started positioning it under the front axle of the Mercedes. The hydraulics whined. Tyler took a step forward like he was going to physically stop him, and then thought better of it, and stepped back again.
"Just let him do his job," Marcus said, not unkindly. "You'll get the car back at the lot. It's paperwork. That's all it is."
"It's not paperwork," Meredith said. "It's harassment, and I'll have my lawyer on it before noon."
I stood there on my own driveway, in front of my own garage, watching a man I'd called at my own expense hook up a car that had been deliberately parked to block my livelihood, and I was the villain of the scene. It was almost funny. Not quite funny enough to laugh at, but almost.
Tyler was pacing now, short little laps on the sidewalk, the phone still in his hand. Every few steps he'd glance at the Mercedes like he expected it to move on its own. Meredith watched Marcus work with her arms crossed, her jaw set, and I could see her calculating — who to call, what to say, how to make this the tow driver's fault or the dispatcher's fault or anybody's fault but the boy's who'd parked the car.
Marcus finished positioning the lift and stood up, wiping his hands on a rag from his back pocket. He looked at me. "Ready when you are," he said.
I nodded. Then Meredith said, one more time, like she was sealing something: "You'll regret this."