At 6:45 on a Monday morning, I stood behind my kitchen curtain and watched Linda park her enormous black SUV squarely in the middle of my driveway. She did not knock, ask permission or even glance at the PRIVATE DRIVEWAY sign she had ignored for months; she simply crossed the street in her robe and disappeared into her house. Fifteen minutes later, the low rumble of a 1967 Mustang rolled down Chestnut Street,
followed by a Corvette, a Camaro, two vintage pickups and a powder-blue Cadillac long enough to resemble a small boat. One by one, I waved them into my driveway and down the private gravel lane behind my house. By eight o’clock, thirty vehicles were packed nose to tail around Linda’s
SUV while their owners carried coffee, folding chairs, breakfast casseroles and pounds of bacon into my backyard. Then I heard Linda scream from the front of the house, “What the hell is this?” I stepped onto my porch with my coffee and looked at the wall of cars surrounding her vehicle. “Morning, Linda,” I said. “Some friends came for breakfast.”
My name is Carol, and Linda had been helping herself to my driveway for six months by then. After my husband Robert died suddenly from a heart attack two years earlier, I lived alone and kept my sedan in the garage, leaving most of the driveway empty. Linda apparently decided unused space was available space. At first she parked there for ten minutes while visiting someone across the street;
eventually ten minutes became hours, then entire afternoons and even overnight stays. I asked politely, then firmly, and finally installed a metal PRIVATE DRIVEWAY sign. She parked directly beneath it and told me, “You barely use the thing anyway.” What Linda could not understand was why that driveway sat empty. Robert had been devoted to classic cars and belonged to the same local club for more than twenty years. Every September, our property had filled with polished Mustangs, Pontiacs and Cadillacs while Robert stood outside before sunrise directing traffic, coffee cooling on a fender as he shouted instructions nobody could hear over the engines.
After his death, I sold his Pontiac and stopped hosting the gatherings because every empty space reminded me exactly where he should have been standing. Then one Thursday morning Linda’s SUV blocked my car inside the garage and I missed a specialist appointment I had waited nearly two months to attend. When I confronted her later, she shrugged. “You should’ve told me you needed the driveway this morning.” That was when six months of patience finally ran out.
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