Every relationship has its ups and downs. After seventeen years of marriage, I have learned to navigate the most predictable shifts, but I was completely blindsided by an up-and-down episode last week that played out in the Panera parking lot. Because my husband and I both finish work early on Fridays, we have a longstanding tradition of meeting for lunch. This particular Friday we met at Panera, where I parked by the side entrance, and he parked a few hundred feet away near the front entrance.
Aside from featuring a particularly generous portion of my beloved strawberry-poppyseed salad, lunch was uneventful. We cleared our table and exited to our respective parking spots, our view of each other blocked by the corner edge of the restaurant. Now, let me give you a little background info—for the entire month leading up to that very Friday, I’d been driving my husband’s car while mine was being repaired after I’d accidentally driven straight into the wall of our garage, as one does, but that’s obviously another story for another day. My point is I had three separate key fobs on my key ring, and I’d been using my husband’s fob every day for the previous four weeks.
So, as I approached my newly repaired car that afternoon, I, not surprisingly, clicked my husband’s fob out of habit. But nothing happened. I immediately feared something had gone haywire because of the extensive repairs, but I clicked the fob again. Still nothing. My panic beginning to rise, I tried clicking “lock” and “unlock” in succession several times, but nothing was happening. Well, not in my parking space, that is, because just barely around the corner, my husband thought his car was bewitched when the door locks started repeatedly going up and down on their own.
Suddenly, in the middle of my incessant and ineffective clicking, I had an uncharacteristic flash of brilliance, remembering I could use the actual key that’s tucked inside the fob to unlock my door just like our Neanderthal ancestors used to do. But dimwitted homo sapiens that I am, I tried to jam my husband’s key in the lock, of course to no avail. Panicked and convinced the repair shop had completely destroyed my key/lock mechanism, I called my husband, who was just pulling onto the highway, and blurted, “Come back! My car door won’t open. They ruined my key!”
With the same even-tempered demeanor he displayed the day I called and told him I’d driven into the garage wall, my husband calmly replied, “It’s okay, don’t worry, I’m turning around right now.”
“Okay,” I blubbered as I looked down in frustration at the useless collection of keys and fobs I was clutching in my hand. And then, as if my neurons had finally begun firing, I realized I had been using the wrong fob/key. “Oh, dear God,” I cried into the phone. “You don’t need to come back. I know what the problem was.”
“You were using the wrong key, weren’t you?” my husband, familiar with my often screwy ways, quickly surmised.
A little offended that he’d figured it out so swiftly, I offered a noncommittal “Maybe” in response.
He laughed out loud and comforted me with his usual line, “Don’t worry, baby. This happens in the best of families.”
In the end, we both made it home safely in our respective cars, and I didn’t even drive into the garage wall. I don’t know if this stuff really does happen in the best of families, but I know I have the best of husbands and he has the only key that really matters, the one to my heart.