The morning the tow truck came for Eleanor's Mustang, Harold Brennan was already awake, because Harold Brennan was always awake before the sun had made up its mind. Seventy-eight years old and his body still kept firehouse hours, rising at half past four as it had for three decades, the old alarm clock on his nightstand ticking though he never needed it anymore. He made coffee the way he always had, two scoops in the dented percolator Eleanor had bought at a yard sale in 1974, and he carried the mug out to the front porch in his slippers and the cardigan with the frayed cuffs, and he sat in the wicker chair that creaked in exactly the spot where his weight had worn it down over forty years, and he looked at the car.
The car sat in the driveway where it had sat for most of its life, a 1967 Ford Mustang fastback in Candy Apple Red, though the candy had faded to something softer now, a red gone dusty at the edges like a rose pressed too long between pages. The chrome bumpers wore a film of oxidation. One hubcap was missing, lost somewhere on Route 9 in the spring of 1989, and Eleanor had always meant to replace it and never had, and after she was gone Harold had decided the missing hubcap could stay missing, because it was hers that way. A thin skin of pollen lay over the hood. The tires were low but not flat. The car had not moved in nineteen months, not since the week before Eleanor died, when she had asked him to take her for one last drive and he had eased her into the passenger seat with a blanket over her knees and driven slow around the lake while she held his hand and watched the water go by.
Harold drank his coffee and watched the light come up over Maple Hollow, the subdivision where he had lived for forty-four years, where the lawns were cut to putting-green uniformity and the mailboxes all matched and the shutters were all the same approved shade of colonial blue. He had watched the neighborhood change around him the way a man watches a river change its course, slowly and then all at once. When he and Eleanor bought the house in 1982, Maple Hollow was a loose collection of young families and retirees and one fellow who kept chickens despite everything, and nobody much cared what color your shutters were. Then the homeowners association hired a management company, and the management company hired a compliance officer, and the compliance officer bought a little white golf cart, and now there were rules about the height of your hedges and the placement of your trash bins and the precise angle of your flagpole, and Harold, who had once run into a burning building to carry out a stranger's baby, received quarterly letters informing him that his lawn ornaments were nonconforming.
The letter that changed everything arrived on a Tuesday, tucked between a coupon circular and a water bill. It was printed on the heavy cream stationery of the Maple Hollow Homeowners Association, and it bore the signature of the association president, a woman named Diane Kessler, no relation to anyone Harold knew, who had moved into the neighborhood eleven years ago and taken over the board within three. Harold read it standing at the mailbox with the sun in his eyes, and then he read it again sitting at the kitchen table, and then he set it down next to the percolator and stared at it the way he had once stared at incident reports, looking for the part that could not possibly be real.
It said that the 1967 Ford Mustang parked in his driveway constituted an inoperable, unregistered vehicle in violation of Section 14-C of the community covenants, that it was deemed an eyesore detrimental to property values, that he had fourteen days to remove it from the premises or have it brought into compliance, and that failure to comply would result in the association exercising its right to have the vehicle towed at the owner's expense, with all fines and fees accruing daily at a rate of fifty dollars per day. There was a photograph attached, taken from the street, of Eleanor's car in his driveway, with the violation circled in red marker as though the car were a wound.
Harold sat at the kitchen table for a long time. The percolator ticked as it cooled. The refrigerator hummed. Out in the driveway, the Mustang sat in the morning light, and Harold thought about the day Eleanor drove it home, twenty-three years old and laughing so hard she could barely get the words out, the dealer plate still on it, her hair in a kerchief, saying, Hal, look what I did, look what I did, and he had been furious for exactly four minutes about the money until she took him for a drive and the V8 opened up on the highway and she looked at him sideways with that grin and he was lost. He thought about the fourteen days. He thought about fifty dollars a day. His pension was modest and fixed and every dollar had a job. He folded the letter in half and put it in the drawer where he kept the rubber bands and the spare keys, and he went out to the garage and found the bucket and the sponge, and he washed Eleanor's car.