I stopped waiting to catch him by accident and started planning for it. That is the difference between a man with a problem and a man with a project, and I became the second kind. I kept my phone in my shirt pocket with the camera ready. I kept the notebook on the workbench instead of by the register. I started writing the count in the margin in big numbers, because small numbers lie to you. Small numbers say this is nothing. Big numbers say what it is.
The next time he came — a Tuesday, 7:56 in the morning, parked straight across the door like he was docking a boat — I was ready. I walked out before he could get the earbuds settled, and I said, "Tyler, you need to stop parking here."
"Sure."
That was it. One word. He did not slow down. He kept walking toward the street, one earbud already in, and I stood there with the word hanging in the air like a receipt for a purchase I had not made. Sure. It was the most expensive word I had ever been sold. I thought about my father then, about the way he handled the one neighbor we ever had trouble with, back when I was a boy. He had gone over with a pie my mother baked and a calm face, and the trouble ended. I did not have a pie. I had a notebook and a phone camera and a margin full of big numbers, and I wondered what my father would have made of that. I went inside and wrote it down: Tuesday, 7:56, warning given, response: "Sure." Then I drew a line under it and wrote the count in the margin. Six.
Thursday he was back, diagonal again, and I met him at the bumper. I said, "This is private property."
"I know."
Two words this time. An upgrade. He said it the way you confirm something obvious, the way you say the sky is blue to a man asking about the weather. He knew. That was the part that stayed with me after he left. He knew it was private property. He was not confused. He was not mistaken. He knew, and he parked there anyway, and the knowing made it something else entirely. A mistake you forgive. Knowledge is a choice. I wrote it down: Thursday, warning given, response: "I know." Count: seven.
I started varying the approach, the way you vary a diagnostic when the first test tells you nothing. Once I tried calm and professional, the voice I use with a customer who is upset about an estimate. Once I tried direct, no padding: "Move the car." Once I tried the question I had been saving: "Why here? There are spaces on the street." He answered that one with a shrug. An actual shrug, shoulders up, hands out, earbuds in, walking away. I have been shrugged at by teenagers and by service writers at dealerships, but never in my own driveway, and I felt the boundary shift under my feet like a lift settling on uneven concrete. I stood there a long time after he left, looking at the place where the car had been, and I realized I was rehearsing. I was rehearsing the next conversation in my head the way you rehearse a difficult weld, running the angle over and over, because the real thing kept slipping away from me.
Every warning got logged. Date, time, exact words, his exact words. I wrote them the way I write torque specs, because my father said never argue with memory, and I was done arguing with mine. The notebook stopped being a work log and became a record. There is a difference. A work log says what you did. A record says what happened, and a record is for when what happened needs witnesses. I did not know who the witnesses would be. I only knew the count was climbing — eight, nine — and that each number in the margin was a small, quiet failure of everything I had tried.
The politeness was deliberate. I want that on the record. I was not polite because I was afraid. I was polite because I am a businessman on a street where people talk, and because I believed, long after the evidence said otherwise, that a reasonable man can be reasoned with. Politeness was my method. But politeness, I was learning, is a tool, and like any tool it has a specification. Use it past its rating and it breaks in your hand. Mine was bending. The count kept climbing. And somewhere around warning number nine, standing in my driveway at seven in the morning with my notebook in my hand and a Mercedes across my garage door, I understood that I had been polite enough times. What came next would have to be something else.