The week before she died, she rallied, the way the dying sometimes do, a final bright flare before the dark. She asked for the Mustang. Harold and Marty lifted her into the passenger seat as gently as if she were made of glass, tucked the blanket around her knees, and Harold drove. He drove around the lake, slow, the windows down, the late-afternoon sun turning the water to hammered gold. Eleanor held his hand and watched the light on the water, and after a while she said, Hal, do you remember the Poconos, when we got lost and I glued the compass to the dashboard, and he said he remembered, and she said, I was never lost with you, not once, not ever, and he had to pull over because he could not see the road. She died four days later, on a Thursday morning, with Harold holding her hand and the hallway clock ticking in the next room, and the funeral was full of firefighters and kindergarteners grown old, and the bagpipes played, because Eleanor had always loved the bagpipes, and Harold stood at the grave in his good jacket and did not cry until everyone had gone, and then he cried the way a building collapses, all at once and from the inside.
For nineteen months he had kept the Mustang exactly as she left it. He had not driven it. He had not washed it, until the letter came. He had simply kept it, in the driveway, where it belonged, the way you keep a lighthouse lit after the ships have all gone home. The neighbors understood, most of them. Mrs. Abernathy from next door brought casseroles for a month and never once mentioned the car. Old Pete Dugan across the street, who had known Harold since the firehouse days, would nod at the Mustang whenever he walked by, a small salute of acknowledgment. The mailman, a young fellow named Jesse, once told Harold that his grandfather had a '67 fastback too, and Harold had talked to him about it for twenty minutes on the porch, the longest conversation he had had with anyone in weeks. The car was not an eyesore. The car was a member of the neighborhood, as much as any of them, with more history on that street than Diane Kessler would ever have.
But Diane Kessler did not see history. Diane Kessler saw a violation. Harold had learned her story in pieces over the years, the way you learn things in a small community, whether you want to or not. She had been a regional vice president for a logistics company, accustomed to command, and she had retired to Maple Hollow eleven years ago with her husband, a quiet man named Robert who played golf and stayed out of her way. Within two years she was on the board. Within three she was president. She ran the association the way she had run her division, with metrics and enforcement actions and quarterly goals, and under her leadership the community's property values had indeed risen, and the common areas were indeed immaculate, and the residents were, many of them, quietly miserable. She had a particular zeal for vehicles. In her first year as president she had spearheaded the campaign against a young couple's pickup truck with a camper shell, which she deemed a commercial vehicle. The couple had sold the truck. The next year it was a teenager's project car, a Honda up on blocks in a garage with the door open, visible from the street for one weekend while the boy changed the transmission. The boy's father had moved the car and then moved the family, two years later, to a neighborhood without an HOA. Harold had watched all of this from his porch with growing unease, the way you watch a fire catch in dry grass, telling himself it was none of his business, telling himself Eleanor would have told him it was exactly his business.
Eleanor would have fought. That was the thing Harold kept coming back to, sitting on his porch in the mornings with his coffee, looking at the car. Eleanor had never once backed down from anything in her life. When the school district tried to cut the kindergarten art program in 1995, Eleanor had organized the parents and marched into the board meeting with thirty five-year-olds' paintings and shamed them into restoring the funding. When a developer tried to put a parking lot where the old oak grove stood at the edge of the neighborhood, Eleanor had chained herself to a tree, at fifty-eight years old, and made the evening news. Harold had always been the steady one, the calm center, the man who ran into burning buildings but avoided confrontation at the grocery store. Eleanor used to tease him about it. Hal, she'd say, you'll face a flashover without blinking but you won't send back a cold steak. And he'd say, Ellie, the steak didn't swear an oath. Now Eleanor was gone, and Diane Kessler was threatening to tow her car, and Harold found, to his surprise, that some of Eleanor's fierceness had rubbed off on him after fifty-six years, like the smell of her perfume in the upholstery, impossible to remove.