The Cul-de-Sac Watch

The plan was simple. I hire a guy. The guy watches. The guy catches Benjamin doing something he shouldn't be doing at his own barbecue. Then I hand the proof to his girlfriend Ester and let her do the rest!

That was the plan anyway. Plans don't account for a transmission dying in the exact cul-de-sac where your ex lives.

I'm Annabel, I'm forty-two, and I'm a park ranger, which means I spend most days telling tourists not to feed the raccoons. It pays okay and it keeps me outside. It does not keep me in new transmissions, apparently.

So there I sat, Saturday around four in the afternoon, engine ticking and dead, in the farthest spot from Benjamin's house that the circle allowed. His place sat at the bottom of the arc like the prize in a cereal box. Balloons on the mailbox. A rented bounce house, deflated, for some reason. Smoke already drifting off the grill.

Twenty years ago I caught him cheating on me. I was twenty-two then, dumb and furious, and I cried into a dorm room pillow for a month. Now I was forty-two and mostly over it. Mostly! That word was doing a lot of work in my head.

Why was I here? That's a fair question and I asked it of myself at least six times while waiting for AAA. Because last spring he'd found me at a hardware store and spent ten minutes telling me about Ester, about the four-bedroom, about his promotion, and he'd smiled the whole time like he was reading a list of ways I'd failed. That's why. Petty? Sure! I never claimed otherwise.

I had the PI's card in my cupholder. Shawn something. Retainer paid, instructions given. I checked my phone. No tow truck for forty minutes, at least.

Then a gray sedan rolled into the circle, slow, like it was lost. It passed my car, paused, and the driver gave me a nod. That was him. I'd met him once at a diner to hand over the check and the photos I'd already taken. Shawn was thirty-eight, broad, with a crew cut and a way of sitting very still.

He parked two houses down, got out in khakis and a plain blue shirt, and walked toward the party carrying a six-pack like a neighbor would. He didn't look at me again. Good man.

I felt something I hadn't expected. A little thrill, right in the chest. We were in on it together, him and me. Two quiet people running an operation against a loud man in a polo shirt. It felt almost like being young again, minus the crying.

He knocked. Benjamin answered and I watched, through the windshield, through the heat shimmer, as Benjamin did his big welcome arms thing. Shawn was inside within a minute. That fast. That smooth.

Okay. So now the job was on. And my job was to sit in a dead Corolla and sweat.

I cracked the windows. Greenfield in August is not gentle. I had half a bottle of warm water and a bag of pretzels from a gas station. Living the dream!

The party filled out over the next hour. Neighbors with casseroles. Families, cousins, half the block, none of my business and none of my concern. A woman in a yellow dress I took for Ester, thirty-five, laughing at Benjamin's jokes the way you laugh when you still think his jokes are new.

Shawn worked the yard. I watched him talk to the man running the grill, then the woman with the casserole, then drift along the fence line. He never stood still long. He held his phone like a man checking texts, but I knew the camera was probably working. Professional. I liked that about him. I filed that thought away and didn't examine it.

Then Benjamin saw my car.

I watched it happen. He was carrying a plate of burgers across the patio, glanced up the circle, and stopped. He set the plate down on a table and started walking. Straight toward me. In his nice leather sandals.

Oh no, I thought. And also: oh yes?

I could have slumped in my seat. I could have pretended to be on my phone. Instead I rolled the window down and waited, because apparently I have no survival instincts at all.

"Well, well," he said, bending to my window. "Annabel. Small world!"

"Is it?" I said. "Seems like a pretty big world, and yet my car died in the worst possible driveway in it."

He laughed like I'd said something charming. "Breakdown, huh? That's rough. You want me to take a look? I know a guy." He said that the way he says everything, like the guy owes him money. "Or you could come eat. We've got plenty!"

"I have a tow coming."

"They always say that. Forty minutes, right? Come on, it's a party!" He gestured back at his kingdom. "You remember Daryl from the grill nights, probably not, that was later. And Ester. You'd like Ester. Everybody likes Ester."

There it was. Everybody likes Ester, said with a smile that meant you didn't win, Annabel, look what I built without you.

"I'm fine here," I said. "Really. I'm people-watching. It's a hobby."

"Watching? Or scouting?" He grinned. God, he still had the same grin. "You look good, by the way. Park ranger life agrees with you. All that hiking."

"Don't flatter my job, Benjamin. You called it 'playing outside' for three years."

"That was college. We were kids." He was twenty-two, same as me, and he'd used that same excuse in the breakup conversation, that we were kids, like the cheating was a childhood disease that had run its course. "Anyway, offer stands. Food's hot."

"So's the asphalt," I said. "Enjoy your party."

He stood there a second longer, then shrugged and walked back, easy as anything, because losing had never once happened to Benjamin in his own mind. My hands were shaking a little on the wheel. Not fear. Anger, the old kind, the kind I thought I'd composted years ago out on the trails.

I texted Shawn. He's onto me. Just talked to me. Be careful.

The reply came fast. Understood. He invited me to help with the grill. Perfect cover. Sit tight, I'll handle it.

Sit tight. In an oven with pretzels. Sure!

But what I noticed while I fumed was this. My first thought after the anger was: he texted back fast. He answered me like I mattered. Benjamin never once texted back fast, not even when we were together and I was twenty-one and pathetic about it.

I shook that off. Shawn was a professional. Professionals text back. That's what retainers buy.

The tow truck, of course, was running late. The dispatcher said fifty more minutes, and I said words a ranger probably shouldn't say, and she said she understood. The sun dropped lower. String lights came on along Benjamin's patio, little warm bulbs, and the party got louder and softer at the same time.

Shawn was leaning on the fence now, talking with a bald guy who gestured a lot. Then he moved inside the house. I lost him for a while and hated how much I noticed losing him. Focus, Annabel. The mission. The proof. The folder I was going to hand to Ester with a sympathetic little frown.

Except watching her in the yellow dress, laughing, holding a wine glass, I felt a small cold slide in my stomach. Did I actually want to blow up her evening? She'd met him three years ago at some networking event. She didn't cheat on me. She was just the next person after me. There'd be others after her too, probably, if the pattern held.

The tow truck finally rumbled into the circle at nearly eight, lights spinning. The driver, a heavyset guy named Barney, took one look at the Corolla and sighed the sigh of a man who's seen four of these already that week.

"Transmission?" he asked.

"Whatever the worst noise is, that's the one it made."

"Yeah, that's a trans." He started hooking up. "Where we taking her?"

I gave the shop address and then, because the evening apparently wasn't done humiliating me, Benjamin came back down the driveway with a to-go plate covered in foil.

"Barney, hey," Benjamin called. He knew the tow guy. Of course he knew the tow guy. "Annabel, take this at least. Burgers and potato salad. Can't have you starving on the side of the road."

I stared at the plate. It smelled fine. It was probably poisoned with smugness.

"Thanks," I heard myself say, and took it, because I was hungry and pride is not a food group.

"No problem." He tapped the roof of the car twice, some old habit I remembered from college, and walked back to his lights and his guests and his life.

Barney finished up and I rode in the truck's cab with the plate on my lap, watching the cul-de-sac shrink in the side mirror. Somewhere back there, Shawn was working. Somewhere back there, my revenge was at a barbecue without me.

And somewhere in my chest, which I was not planning on examining at all, that nod from the gray sedan was still sitting there, warm as one of those little string light bulbs.

We got four blocks. Four whole blocks. Then Barney's radio crackled and he swore and pulled over by a shut gas station.

"You're kidding me," he said into the radio. "Tonight of all nights." He looked back at me. "Bad news, hon. Shop closed early, some kind of issue with the lift. And the impound yard's full. I can't leave this car anywhere but right where we found it."

"Right where we found it is in front of my ex-boyfriend's house."

"I heard you the first time, hon." He shrugged those big shoulders. "I gotta unhook and take you back. That's just how it is."

So we drove back. Back down the street, back around the arc, back to the bottom of the cul-de-sac where my dead Corolla sat like a confession. Barney unhooked it, patted the hood like it was a horse, and left me with a card and a warning that Monday was his earliest opening. Monday. Forty-eight hours of my car sitting at the entrance to Benjamin's little kingdom.

Great! Wonderful! What a Saturday!

I climbed back into the driver's seat with my foil plate and my warm water bottle and my pretzels and my shame. At least the string lights were pretty. At least it was cooler now, August in Greenfield finally letting go of the day, so I cracked the windows and settled in like the world's most motivated burglar.

My phone buzzed. Shawn.

A photo came through first. Benjamin at the grill, leaning close to a woman I didn't recognize, tall, dark ponytail