On this note of self-pity, James turned to the window and saw Chuckles pulling in with his other car, not the SUV but a white van, planks of wood sticking out the back, dangerously untethered. He was taking up two spaces again, leaving a huge gap on either side. His silver SUV was parked up the street.

James placed a throw pillow under Finn’s sleeping head and stood up. He strode toward the door.

Chuckles had not moved from his van. He sat shuffling papers and smoking when James appeared at the window. In his anger, James had failed to put on shoes and stood now on the road in a pair of dark blue cashmere argyle socks. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles. As Chuckles rolled down the window, he seemed to take in James from the top of his head—the thinning hair slightly shining with wax, the ironic beard, the expensive untucked button-down shirt in a grayish pink—and then stopped at his feet. James, too, looked down then at the dumb, dog-snouted, shoeless appendages and thought: Disadvantage.

But oh well, he was in it now, hot with rage. Up close, James was surprised by Chuckles’s face. He had pcitured him as a kid, a know-nothing just out of trade school. Yet up close, the face was lined and browned, as if from some stain, like the hands of a leather dyer. And the guy was bigger, too, than James had supposed, as often seemed to be the case at moments like this, he noted to himself. And also, Chuckles looked angry. This anger, located mostly in the sneer of Chuckles’s lips, snuffed any small hope in James that this might go a different way (A surprise friendship from across the divide? A human interest story on the local news?). No, Chuckles did not like to have his paper shuffling interrupted, or his cigarette. This much was clear.

But what else? What next? James was now upon his enemy empty-handed, without a plan. His entire body tingled. He would, then, improvise.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said, a phrase that he knew did not match the previous furious shoeless strut across the street, the door slamming and knuckle rapping. James’s voice, too, wasn’t quite as loud or manly as he’d anticipated, but instead sounded, even to his own blood-rushed ears, like a little French schoolgirl buying a croissant from a friendly baker. It was in this dulcet tone that James delivered his kicker: “You’re taking up two parking spots. Do you think you could move up?”

Now James waited. The truck leaked a prickly odor of cigarette and rust. Chuckles took one final drag and James waited for the Bazooka Joe finale, the stream of smoke blown in his face. Instead, Chuckles turned and exhaled on the passenger seat.

Then he turned back to James and said: “You the guy who left the note?” His voice was firm, with a vaguely Godfatherish tinge.

Did he? Did he leave it? James hurried through his thoughts. If he answered yes, then that door might open and James might get picked up by his belt loop and hung from the branches of the nearby oak tree. If no, then James had officially slapped down his admission to an amusement park only for pussies, where the rides were slow and low to the ground and the seatbelts thick and castrating. He made a quick decision.

“Yeah, that was me,” said James.

Chuckles’s eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you sign it?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you sign it?”

James considered this question and how it firmly located him on the wrong side of reason. If he had signed the note, he would not be here now. The whole thing could have been resolved at the kitchen island over one of Ana’s perfect espressos. But no, he had not put his name on it, had, in fact hidden, once again, behind his little pen and his paper, his tiny ideas, his life of distant reportage.

James elected not to answer the question.

“The point is, you have a garage, and we don’t. Why don’t you use it?” His squeak grew fuller, if not deeper, and the little French girl in him whined: “Show some respect for your neighbors! Show it! Show it!” The last words sputtered and landed on a face, one that was suddenly up against James’s, a large hamburger face attached to a larger neck and a body that had exited the car so swiftly, James had barely seen it happen. Chuckles was wearing steel-toed work boots as tall as downhill ski boots, and one of them was on James’s right argyle foot, grinding down.

“Respect this, cocksucker,” said Chuckles, not living up to his nickname, grinding James’s right foot like it was an un-snuffable cigarette butt. James closed his eyes and let the heat pour over his toes, smelling Chuckles’s meaty breath, waiting it out.

His work done, Chuckles stepped back and slammed his door shut. He leaned against the car, crossing his arms as James limped slowly into the road, backing away.

“It’s”—he squeaked—“about … courtesy!”

Chuckles barked a laugh and shouted: “This is what you have to worry about? Don’t you have a fucking family, cocksucker? Go worry about your family!”

“The social contract!” called James, limping toward the island of his porch, where he leaned on a post to straighten up, trying to keep his crippled foot tucked beneath him. Something moved in the picture window, a blur of blond hair. Finn had not been sleeping, then. James shut his eyes against that reality.

“Have a nice day, cocksucker!” yelled Chuckles as James opened his door, suggesting that he, James, had earned his own nickname. Cocksucker and Chuckles: the sitcom no one wanted to see.

The orange tin bird that Ana had hung in the center of the door swung on its discreet nail.

Inside, James turned the lock and inserted the chain. He hobbled to the living room and immediately saw Finn, rigid and upright on the couch, staring at him.

“Who that guy?” said Finn, pointing out the window, a look of grave concern on his face. “Who?”

James sank down next to Finn, his foot throbbing. “It’s no one. It’s a guy. A neighbor,” he said. Finn looked down at James’s foot and made a sound like a lion tearing meat. “Grrr!” he said. James tried to smile, but pain shot through his leg. At his wince, Finn returned to his look of fear.

“It’s okay, Finn,” he said. And he tried to conjure up some of the anger that had taken him over there in the first place, but he couldn’t touch it. “I did a stupid thing.”

Finn looked at him. “Why?”

In lieu of answering that particular question, James echoed something he’d seen a large purple puppet utter during a children’s show on the same public television station that had fired him: “ ‘It’s not right to fight. It’s better to use your words.’ ” Finn had a look of incredulousness on his face that struck James as extremely mature.

James picked up the remote control and found an attractive young Asian woman in a cape and bodysuit singing a song about recycling. The effect was instant; Finn turned to stone, mouth slack in the television’s glow.

Grasping the handrail, James pulled himself to the bedroom, opening the door to the strange midday darkness of the ill. Ana rattled in her chest as she slept. The room smelled of sick breath and orange juice.

James clumped past the bed to the bathroom. He turned on the light and shut the door, perching on the edge of the bathtub. He pulled his sock from his foot. The sole of the sock was thick with dirt, specks of mysterious gelatin and baby stones. His toes, as they emerged, were grotesque, red and swelling before his eyes like sea anemones. Only the little one looked undamaged and pale up against its expanding siblings.

“Ana,” he whimpered. She would know what to do: ice and peroxide and bandages. But she remained in her bed, burdened by her own illness. She was dreaming of the Max Klinger painting on Mike’s coffee table; she could hear the crunching of the grass as the man stole away, baby in arms. She could feel the mother breathing, but not waking. She tried to rouse her, to step into the painting from the outside and shake the mother awake: Tend to your disaster! she wanted to scream, but she could not make a sound, and she could not wake herself, either. She was trapped in the four borders of the gray and white idyll.