Courtesy Calls: The Fire Lane (2)

The tow appeared in the public enforcement report four days later. I confirmed the partial plate against my notes. It matched.

I imagined the sequence of it — the moment of exit from the store, the bags in hand, the walk toward where the Suburban should have been, the fact of its absence, the slow reconstruction of what had happened and why. Then the phone calls, the tow company, the impound lot on Kivett Drive, the fee, the drive home in the recovered Suburban through a Saturday afternoon that had developed opinions about Darrell Burch he hadn't asked for.

Whether the tow would change his behavior in the fire lane was not a question I spent much time on. It would not. That is not how the Darrell Burches of the world operate. Four hundred dollars registers as an injustice, not a lesson. The lesson requires something more specific to the offense.

What I was waiting for I could not create. I could position myself to recognize it. I could ensure that the right conditions were maintained — the logged complaint, the flagged location, the attention. The incident would come, or it would not, on its own schedule, for its own reasons.

This is a distinction I take seriously. I am not in the business of engineering emergencies. I am in the business of ensuring that when circumstances produce their natural consequences, those consequences find the person who produced them.

The waiting itself is worth describing, because people who have not had occasion to wait professionally tend to misunderstand it. They think of waiting as absence — as the space between things, the nothing between events. What it actually is, in practice, is a sustained form of attention. You do not stop working when you are waiting. You maintain the conditions. You review the variables. You check, periodically, whether anything has changed that should change your approach. You do other things, because the waiting is not all there is, but you do the other things with one part of your attention always on the thread you are holding.

In the three weeks between the tow and the incident on Southgate Drive, I did the following: I repaired a section of fence on the eastern pasture line that had been failing since the previous winter. I drove to Greensboro twice for security consulting work I had agreed to in the fall — routine work, the kind where a hospital system or a logistics company wants someone to walk their facility and tell them where the gaps are, which I can do in my sleep and sometimes do. I read four books, two of which were worth finishing. I had coffee at Holt's on Tuesdays and Thursdays and, on two Saturdays, at the Harris Teeter parking lot where I watched the fire lane and noted, twice, that Darrell Burch did not appear. Which told me nothing except that men like Darrell Burch do not always shop on the same Saturday, and that the tow may have adjusted his timing even if it hadn't adjusted his habits.

I thought, during those three weeks, about what I was doing and what I wanted from it. Not in the way of second-guessing — I had done that on the fourth Saturday and arrived at a conclusion I stood behind. What I was thinking about was the purpose of the correction itself. Not punishment. I want to be clear about that, because the word punishment implies a desire to see someone suffer, which is not what this is. What I wanted was for the fire lane to be what it was. What I wanted was for Darrell Burch to understand, through some means that could not be attributed to luck or chance but only to the specific logic of what he had chosen, what the fire lane was for. Not abstractly. In his body. In the way you understand things that arrive with a bill attached.

There is a theory of education, which I developed over years of working with men who were being trained to do serious things in difficult circumstances, that holds that information not attached to consequence is not retained. You can tell a man something a hundred times. If it costs him nothing, it leaves no mark. The mark comes from the cost. The cost comes from the consequence. The consequence comes from the world, if you have arranged things correctly.

I had arranged things correctly. I was waiting for the world.

I picked up my shirts.

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On the third Thursday after the tow, at two fourteen in the afternoon, a cardiac event occurred at a residence on Southgate Drive.

I was on East Dixie for unrelated reasons. Park's Cleaners is on the same strip and I had dress shirts from the previous week still behind the counter. Paul Park does meticulous work on wool and the shirts were ready on schedule. That is the complete and unabridged reason I was on East Dixie Drive that Thursday afternoon.

I noted the Suburban in the fire lane as I drove past. I parked. I collected my shirts. I came out of Park's at two seventeen.

The medical response unit came up East Dixie at two seventeen. I watched it navigate the approach to Southgate Drive. The fire lane was occupied by the Suburban, which meant the unit's preferred approach required modification — not a significant diversion, not a catastrophic delay, but a navigation adjustment of the kind that gets noted in incident reports by thorough respondents and entered into the permanent record of the event.

The patient was a sixty-eight-year-old man named Theodore Garner who had no connection to me or to anything in this account. He was transported to Randolph Health and recovered fully.

The documented delay was three minutes. The incident report language: Access to East Dixie approach complicated by vehicle obstruction in fire lane, Harris Teeter, 1420 East Dixie Drive. Estimated additional response time: three minutes.

Three minutes. In the record. Timestamped. Connected, by the incident report itself — not by me — to a specific vehicle at a specific location at a specific time.

I drove home. I hung my shirts in the closet. I stood at the kitchen counter for a while and looked at the blue glass bird in the window. The afternoon light was doing something to it — coming through at an angle that made it less solid than usual, more like a suggestion of a bird than a bird, which is not something I had noticed it do before.

My mother would have had a word for what it looked like. She had been attentive to things like that. The way light moved through a room had been a matter of real interest to her, in the way that women who clean other people's rooms for forty years develop a precise relationship with what light reveals about a surface. She had cleaned the same rooms in the same houses in some cases for twenty years and she had known, without being told, when a family was under pressure or when something had changed or when something was wrong. She had kept this knowledge to herself, mostly, because she understood the difference between having information and using it.

I thought about whether what I was doing was different from what she did.

The conclusion I arrived at — having been over it more than once, in the time since she died and the time since I began the Saturdays in parking lots — was that it was different in degree rather than in kind. She had observed and understood and held. I observed and understood and, when the observation produced a clear case, acted. The acting was the addition. Whether it was an improvement on the holding, I couldn't say with certainty. It was what I did.

I made dinner. I went to bed at my usual time. The twelve acres were quiet and the wood line was dark with new leaves and the night made no particular demands.

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The following Saturday, the fire lane was empty.

Darrell Burch's Suburban was in space fourteen, second row, approximately ninety feet from the entrance. Standard space. Not the close spaces he could have used. Not the handicapped spaces near the door, which the placard permitted. A middle space in the second row, the kind a man ends up in when he is looking for something and accepting what he finds rather than imposing what he wants.

I parked in space twenty-two.

I noted that space fourteen and space twenty-two are both spaces. This sounds like a minor point. It is not.

I gathered my things — coffee, ground beef, crackers — and walked across the parking lot in the April morning air, which was the kind of air that has decided to be warm and has committed to it. The walk was ninety feet, give or take. It took less than a minute. It required no particular effort.

I paid for my groceries. I walked back across the parking lot. I loaded my truck. A woman with a cart passed behind me with a child in the seat who was holding a box of cereal and examining it with the deep concentration of someone for whom the world is still composed entirely of questions. I held my truck door for a moment while they cleared my space. The woman thanked me without looking up from her own concentration, which was on her phone, and they moved on.

I drove to Holt's.

Pearl asked if I wanted anything besides coffee.

"Pie," I said. "Whatever you think."

She brought lemon chess. I did not tell her it was the same kind as the last time, because it is not the kind of thing I generally track out loud. I ate it while the Saturday morning moved around me — the counter filling, the booths, the couple at the far end who come in most Saturdays and order the same things and talk to each other in the quiet shorthand of people who have been talking for a long time. The smell of the diner was what it always is — coffee and something frying in the back and the particular warmth of a room that has been occupied for years by people who keep coming back.

Pearl refilled my coffee. The coffee was good, as it always is.

"You look like you slept," she said, passing with the pot.

"I did," I said.

She moved on down the counter. I read the paper. The paper had nothing in it that required more than twenty minutes of my attention. The rest of the time I sat and drank my coffee and watched Fayetteville Street conduct its regular Saturday business through the glass door and thought about nothing in particular, which is something I have been learning, slowly, to do.

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The blotter item appeared the following Tuesday.

I read it twice. Folded the paper.

Pearl was at the far end talking to the man who drives the landscaping truck, a big man with a specific kind of quiet who comes in most mornings before his crew. She said something I couldn't make out from where I was sitting. He laughed the way certain people laugh at the same kind of thing for years and still find it worth it.

I finished my coffee. Three dollars on the counter, which is what I always leave. See you Thursday, Pearl. See you Thursday.

Through the glass door, Fayetteville Street was conducting its regular Tuesday business — the traffic, the people, the county going about its Tuesday. The air through the door, when I pushed through it, smelled like cut grass and vehicle exhaust and the particular mineral quality that Randolph County has in April, when the clay is wet and everything in the ground is making its decisions.

I drove home on roads I have known most of my life. The twelve acres were quiet. I had things to do.

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From The Courier-Tribune: A Southgate Drive resident was transported to Randolph Health Thursday following a cardiac episode. Responding paramedics reported a brief access delay due to an improperly parked vehicle on the route. The vehicle's owner received a notice from the city. The patient is reported to be recovering.