There was a sentence available to me then. Three words, ordinary words, and in that setting they would have been a weapon: I am a judge. I could almost hear them leaving my mouth. I imagined her smile fading as she calculated what it might mean to have a man who wore a black robe for work standing on the other side of the fence. I imagined the motor home disappearing before morning and the neighbors suddenly remembering their manners.
I did not say it.
I had been appointed to the county bench after a long career in private practice. The appointment was new enough that I was still learning which door of the courthouse opened fastest in the morning and which coffee machine could be trusted. When I was a young clerk, an older judge told me the robe was the only piece of clothing that grew heavier every time you wore it outside the courtroom. I had laughed then. Standing beside Patricia's motor home, I understood what he meant.
A judicial office is not a private tool. It belongs to the public that entrusted it to the officeholder, and its authority does not follow him home to settle parking arguments. My neighbors had no obligation to treat me as anything more important than the person named on the recorded deed. If I could not protect my driveway using the same documents and procedures available to everyone else, I had no business borrowing a courthouse to do it.
I told Patricia I expected the vehicle removed. She said she would think about it. I told her she had until the next day to make a plan, and she answered with a thin smile that I ought to learn how to compromise. Then she went inside and closed her door. I got back into the truck, backed away from the driveway, and parked along the public curb behind the motor home.
The first evening I walked past it into my own house, I was more exhausted than angry. My garage was empty and unusable. My driveway belonged to me in every record I could find, but the only thing visible from the street was someone else's recreational vehicle guarding the door. I ate dinner standing over the kitchen sink because the table was still in pieces. There is a special fatigue that comes from spending a day resolving other people's disputes and returning home to one nobody wants to admit exists.
Two days later, Patricia discovered my profession.
I know the hour because the courthouse clock above the front steps read twelve fifteen when I came out for lunch. My clerk, Ellen Price, was walking beside me with a schedule in her hands. She had been asking whether the two o'clock matter could move to two thirty, and I was thinking about a sandwich I had left in the office refrigerator. I still had the black robe over my clothes, because I was expected back in the courtroom shortly and had not thought to take it off.
"Judge Hale," Ellen said, "if counsel agrees to the later time, should I have everyone notified?"