Saturday morning, the Mercedes was back, and this time I was already outside. I had started getting up earlier, not because I wanted to, but because I wanted to be the one standing in my own driveway when the day began. He arrived at 8:03. I know the time exactly because I had just checked my watch, thinking about the transmission job waiting on the lift, and then I heard the door slam. He came around the front of the Mercedes with the key fob in his hand, same as before — tall, blond, maybe twenty-four, expensive sneakers, designer jacket, wireless earbuds in both ears. He looked like an advertisement for something I could not afford and did not want.
I said, "You need to move it."
He pulled one earbud out. Just one. The other stayed in, which I took as a statement. He looked at me, then at the car, then back at me, and said, "There's nowhere else." He said it flat, no apology in it, no edge either, the way you would state the weather to a stranger.
I looked down the street. I counted, because that is what I do now. There were six legal parking spaces within fifty yards, plain as day, on the street, at the curb, where cars are supposed to go. I pointed. I said, "Six spaces. Fifty yards. Pick one."
He put the earbud back in. Then he got in the Mercedes, started it — it made a sound like money, I will give it that — and backed it up. Not forward. Not away. Backward, six feet farther into my driveway, right up toward the garage door, close enough that the bumper nearly kissed the concrete apron. He rolled the window down. He smiled. He said, "Better?"
"No."
He laughed. It was not a nervous laugh. It was the laugh of a young man who has never been told no by anything he could not buy or charm. He put the car in drive and pulled away, smooth and easy, and I stood there watching him go, and the thing I felt was not anger. Anger would have been useful. What I felt was the specific stillness that comes before anger, the way the shop goes quiet before the compressor kicks on. I understood something standing there in the dust of his departure: this was not going to be solved with one conversation. A man who laughs at "no" is a man who has already decided the rules are suggestions, and suggestions do not apply to him. I walked inside, wrote the time and the exchange in the notebook, and underlined the word farther twice. Then I went back to the transmission job, and my hands knew what to do even though my head was somewhere else.
The thing about a man like that is you can tell he has been practicing. Nobody backs six feet farther into someone's driveway on their first try. That move had rehearsal in it. That was a move made by a person who had been told to move before, somewhere else, and had learned that moving backward works better than moving away. I thought about that while I worked, and I did not like where the thinking went. A rehearsed move means an audience. Somebody had taught him, or somebody had watched him and said nothing, and in my experience the second one is worse. Teaching is honest. Silence is permission.
Monday morning, I called the number again — the one on the registration sticker. This time somebody answered. A woman's voice, smooth, practiced, the kind of voice that has ended conversations by smiling through the phone. I told her who I was and where I lived and that a dark blue Mercedes registered to her household was being parked across my garage door. She sighed, and the sigh had choreography in it. She said the car belonged to her son, Tyler. Tyler Vaughn. She said he was young. She said she would talk to him. Her name was Meredith Vaughn, and she lived in the big house with the white columns across the street, the one I had been looking at for years without ever knocking on the door.
After she hung up, I sat with the phone in my hand for a minute. I had two names now. Tyler Vaughn, twenty-four, expensive sneakers. Meredith Vaughn, late fifties, blonde, cream blouse from what I would later learn, gold bracelet, perfect makeup. I wrote both names in the notebook, and under them I wrote the date, and under that I wrote a line from my father that I had not thought of in years: machines don't lie. People do. The car had been telling me the truth since Tuesday. A person was finally giving me the other version. I decided to trust the car.