- The Devils
She was a big, buxom woman with a loud voice. He was a weaselly, wispy-whiskered man with tattoos slathered on every exposed part of his body, before skin art went mainstream.
In over sixty years of living next to this house with a shared driveway, my mother had never experienced neighbors like this.
“How did they afford this house?” I asked my brother Pat, who lived five miles from our childhood home. “Her parents bought it for them,” he replied.
When I asked Mike, my Mom’s retired cop friend, if he had ever met people like this, he said, “Only when I’ve arrested them.”
My father, who had died 20 years earlier, would have labeled them white trash. In the two long years they lived next to Mom before their marriage collapsed and they moved, Pat and I called them much worse.
The problem was that our mother was 90 and still driving. Her garage and their garage shared a common space big enough for our childhood wiffle ball and basketball games. Soon after they moved in, they began parking their car outside their garage and just off to the side of Mom’s exit path from her garage.
The first time Pat noticed this, he knocked on their door to introduce himself and ask them to move their car into a parking space that would give Mom plenty of room to back out. That’s what all her neighbors had done for decades and what our family had done with two cars when their three sons were growing up.
“She’s got plenty of room,” barked the tattoo man. “And she hardly ever uses her car,” added his larger half. At this point in the story, you’ve got to understand something about my late brother, who died earlier this year of liver cancer.
Even later in life, he was a formidable physical presence, well-weathered from his college pitching days. And, in his work as a Sherwin-Williams regional sales manager, he was used to dealing with hard-nosed contractors. In other words, he was not easily intimidated. And he wasn’t by this pair of Bonnie and Clyde pretenders.
But nothing he said or intimated worked: “She’s got plenty of room.”
2. The Angels
Until this happened.
It was late at night during the summer of 2014: “Your mother fell outside her house. We’re sitting with her in her kitchen. Your number was on her kitchen table. She’s got a cut on her forehead that we’ve bandaged,” said Bonnie to Pat.
When Pat arrived 20 minutes later, he took Mom to the emergency room. It was around midnight. Returning two hours later, he noticed a light on in their house. As he was walking Mom down the sidewalk in her backyard, her newly winged angels appeared at the back stoop, wondering how she was doing.
Pat thanked them.
“It’s like they were different people,” he told me the day after recounting this incident.
Six months later, they were gone, and the house was sold to a young man who always parked his car in the garage.
Over that half-year, the Jekyll-and-Hyde couple continued to park their car in the middle of their half of the driveway.
Mom only snapped one side mirror.
Which Pat paid for.
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