“I’m not going to crucify him because he put a tiny mark on your precious little toy car,” she sneered, and any hope of a reasonable solution died right there in her cluttered foyer.
That “toy” was the last piece of my father I had left, restored from a rusted skeleton with five years of my life and a small fortune.
Her little angel used its fender as a skate rail, and my hidden camera caught the whole, deliberate act, right down to his smug little smile. Karen, his mother, watched the footage and actually laughed before painting me as some crazy old woman with nothing better to do than harass her son.
The condo association wouldn’t help; the system was designed to protect the people who shout the loudest and ignore the rules.
What she didn’t know was that the path to her financial ruin was already paved by her own neglect, hidden in the fine print of a rulebook she’d never bothered to read.
The Gathering Storm: The Sound of Trouble
My husband, Mark, says I love that car more than I love him. He says it with a grin, so I know he’s not really keeping score, but he’s not entirely wrong. My 1966 Ford Mustang, Cherry Red with a pristine white interior, isn’t just a car. It’s a time machine. It’s the last tangible piece of my father, the man who spent a decade of weekends under its hood, his knuckles perpetually stained with grease and his face lit with a singular focus I rarely saw anywhere else. When he passed, he left it to me—a half-finished skeleton of rust and potential. I spent the next five years, and a significant chunk of my graphic design income, bringing her back to life.
Now, she sits under a custom-fit silk cover in my designated spot, number 37, in the cavernous concrete belly of our condo building. The spot is prime, right near the elevator, a small perk of being one of the building’s original owners.
The trouble started not with a bang, but with a thwack. A recurring, echoing thwack-thwack-clatter that reverberated up the concrete columns and through the floor into our living room. It was the sound of hard urethane wheels on polished concrete, the sharp crack of a skateboard tail hitting the ground. It was the sound of teenagers.
“They’re at it again,” I’d muttered, looking up from my tablet.
Mark didn’t even lower his newspaper. “It’s a parking garage, Cheryl. They’re not hurting anything.”
He was a good man, my Mark, but his ability to tune out the world was both a superpower and a source of profound irritation. He couldn’t hear the grating shouts that followed the thwack, or the tinny blast of some mumble rap artist I was too old to name. To him, it was just ambient noise. To me, sitting three floors above my four-wheeled daughter, it was the sound of a looming threat.
An Unofficial Skate Park
The next Saturday, I went down to get a cleaning cloth I’d left in Cherry’s trunk. The elevator doors slid open to a wall of sound and teenage funk. Four of them, all limbs and attitudes, had turned the area by the main garage door into their personal X Games venue. A portable speaker was perched on an electrical box, rattling the metal casing. Empty chip bags and crushed energy drink cans formed a little shrine of adolescent consumption in the corner.
One of them, a lanky kid with a spray of acne across his nose, was trying to ride up the curved wall of the entrance ramp. His board shot out from under him and skittered across the floor, stopping a foot from the fender of a neighbor’s Lexus. He laughed, a loud, barking sound that echoed in the enclosed space. The owner of the Lexus, a meticulous accountant named Mr. Gable, would have a coronary if he saw this.
I walked toward my spot, my keys jingling, a deliberate announcement of my presence. The music didn’t stop, but the motion did. Four pairs of eyes tracked me. I recognized one of them—Aiden. He lived in 5B with his mother. I’d seen them in the elevator. He had his mother’s defiant chin but none of her tired softness. He was all sharp angles and a carefully cultivated scowl.
I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? “Please don’t treat our shared living space like a garbage dump?” “Could you possibly have your fun with a little less sonic assault?” I’d just be the cranky old lady in 3A. So I just unlocked Cherry’s trunk, retrieved my microfiber cloth, locked it again, and walked away, feeling their eyes on my back the whole time. The moment the elevator doors closed, the thwack-clatter started again.
About the Author
