The first police car arrived before I had finished unloading the third box.
It was a Sunday a little after noon, the sort of late-summer noon when the light looks almost white and every roof in a subdivision seems to have been laid beneath the same ruler.
The asphalt of Larks Lane shimmered in the heat. Across the cul-de-sac, sprinklers worked in synchronized arcs over grass that had never been permitted to grow long enough to look natural. I had my tailgate down, a box of kitchen towels beneath one arm, and the strange satisfaction of standing on a driveway that finally belonged to me.
Eleven days earlier, I had signed the closing papers on 14 Larks Lane. I had signed them slowly, after reading each page with the habit of a man who had spent nearly thirty years watching ordinary words become expensive problems. I had checked the legal description, the easements, the survey, the homeowners association disclosures, and the line showing where my property ended and the public sidewalk began. The house was nothing extraordinary, beige stucco with a two-car garage, a narrow backyard, and a kitchen that looked toward a line of sycamores. It was exactly the sort of unremarkable place I wanted.
I had spent too many years in places where the telephone was always ringing and somebody expected an answer. My work had followed me through rented apartments, airport lounges, and the dining room of the last house I had occupied. This was supposed to be different. The living room needed a lamp, one upstairs faucet dripped, and the upstairs carpet smelled faintly of the cleaning service the seller had used. Those were problems I knew how to live with.
The cruiser came around the circular end of the street and stopped with its nose pointed at my truck's rear bumper. No siren sounded. The roof lights flashed red and blue against my garage door and across the clean stucco of a house in which I had not yet spent a single night. I put the box on the tailgate and looked at the police car, wondering whether someone had been hurt farther down the road.
Across the street, a man on a riding mower pulled the throttle back and turned in his seat. Two doors down, a woman holding a garden hose stopped watering, although water continued spilling across the sidewalk. Somewhere behind me a screen door clicked shut. The neighbors did not seem alarmed by a police car stopping at a new resident's driveway. That absence of surprise was the first detail that stayed with me.
Then I noticed the woman on the neighboring porch.
She stood beneath the white columns of a two-story colonial with sunglasses pushed up into a blonde bob and a laminated identification card swinging from a blue lanyard. Her phone was held horizontally in both hands. She was filming me, the cruiser, the box on the tailgate, and whatever else she imagined might belong in the recording. When she saw that I had noticed, she raised the phone a fraction higher. There was no embarrassment in the gesture. She wanted the exchange documented, and she wanted me to know who was documenting it.