May, 2014
I Never Get Lost Because Everyone Tells Me Where To Go
Ducky has two children.
One is the light of his life, our daughter, Alexandra.
The other is his darling, his baby, the sweetheart he raised from the dead… his Morgan (named Morgan Le Fey).
After surviving his first winter on the east coast, he was panicked that the snow, slush and salt would destroy the car. But he has taken such meticulous care of this elegant vehicle that she's in better shape than most cars one-fifth her age. He is very, very particular about who drives this car. (Mother was still driving when they moved to Virginia, but she never had a chance. He didn't even let her drive it back in England.)
He loves hat car like no other inanimate object—but after we got married and we discovered we were going to be late in life parents, he saw the logic of a more practical car. I wasn't going to give up my van—it's too useful for the store, if nothing else. So we shopped around, found a three-year-old Saturn sedan with almost no mileage on it and sent up a thank you to the original owners of the house who had installed a three-car garage.
It never entered our heads to get rid of Morgan. One, Ducky had poured years of blood, sweat and tears into restoring her. Two, if you weren't hauling a lot of freight and you only had one passenger, she was very handy. Three, she's fun to drive.
Not that I get the chance very often. I do think of her first and always as Ducky's car… but there's something fun about tooling down the road, watching the college boys checking out the car, looking up to see what kind of hot babe is driving a car like that—and the look of horror on their faces as they realize I'm old enough to be their mother. (Yeah, I'm evil that way.)
And Lexi loves her daddy's car. So sometimes we'll do an afternoon errand or two with Morgan just so she gets some exercise and doesn't feel unloved.
"Running over to Costco for printer cartridges and paper!" I called to Suzi one afternoon. "Back in a flash!"
Lexi was already waiting in the car. "Can I get pizza at Costco?"
"May I."
"May I get pizza at Costco?"
I checked my watch. "Yeah, I guess so." A midday junk food nosh sounded good to me, too. We backed out and headed the short distance to Fairfax, and even scored a decent parking spot (not easy at a quarter past one on a Saturday). "Okay, purse, phone—where are the keys?"
Lexi looked at me from the passenger seat. "What keys?"
"The car keys," I said. I had literally just turned off the engine. Logically, they would be in my hand (no such luck). I always put keys in my pocket, but it's hard to put keys in a front pocket while you're sill sitting behind the wheel. Still… I wriggled around and dug my hand into the right front pocket; ring of house and car keys, but not the plastic fob of the Union Jack with one key on it. I dug through my black hole of a purse; no keys. Well, damn!
"Maybe they fell by the gear shift," Lexi suggested. She hopped out, turned around and squatted down for a snake's eye view. "Nope. Not by the gear shift or under my seat," she confirmed. She hurried around to my side and performed the same search, shaking her head slowly. "Nothing."
Ducky keeps a very clean car (unlike someone he's married to). There was nowhere to hide in the Morgan. "This is stupid!" I snapped. "It's not like I took them in the store and lost them! We're sitting in the freaking parking lot!"
"How can you have a yellow alert in spacedock?" Lexi quoted. (SyFy channel had been running the Trek movies all week.) "Should we call Suzi and have her bring the spare?"
"There is no spare," I said morosely. "That key? It's all she wrote."
"Well, let's go back to the beginning." (Sometimes it's really obnoxious when you hear your own words coming out of your kid's face.) "The car was running when we pulled into the parking spot."
I stopped myself from saying, 'Duh.' "Yes."
"You turned off the engine. Then what?"
"I checked that my phone was in the outside pocket and grabbed my purse."
"Where were the keys?"
"They were in my hand! Then they weren't! Poof!" She gave me a look I know she had seen on my side of the discussion before. "I know, it sounds insane and it feels insane from my side, but they just disappeared!"
"Are they in your purse?"
"I never put keys in my purse. Besides, I looked."
"Mommy… there's a lotta crap in your purse," she said patiently.
I couldn't very well scold her for telling the truth. Sighing, I got out of the car and carried my bag to the back to totally empty it. A paperback of Zen Murder. A battered checkbook. A ratty 4x6 spiral notebook and mini pencil. About two months' worth of receipts in varying stages of decay. A mushed and deformed Snickers that had melted and reformed at least three times. Assorted safety pins, three almost empty Tic Tac containers, a slider box of band aids, a half dozen bookmarkers from the library, a handful of sugar packets (a couple had been torn and I now had loose sugar at the bottom of the bag), a few coins that had fallen from my wallet, the wallet in question, a sheet of Burger King coupons that had expired months ago—but no keys. "I told you. I always put them in my pocket."
"Well, check your pocket," she said, sill very patiently.
"I already did." I jammed my hand in my left pocket; nothing. Right pocket; big lump of keys, which I ceremoniously removed and dropped on the purse. "See? No keys." She was only trying to help; I shouldn't have been so bitchy.
"Check your pocket."
"I just did! What do you want, the lint?"
"Check your other pocket."
"I did!"
"Check your other other pocket."
As the bookstore marched down the block, we turned the entrance door to our first takeover into an emergency exit only door and put a sign outside, Please Use Other Door. As we took over the next storefront, some wag made the sign read Please Use Other Other Door to see who noticed. Most people didn't. "What?" I stared at her.
She pointed. "Your knee is lumpy."
"What the—" I grabbed at my knee—and felt… a key. I dug my hand into my pocket again, and ran into solid nothing. Plus my hand was way up by my hip. "What the—" I said again, now thoroughly confused.
Lexi tugged at the side of the pants leg. "There's another pocket here."
"Omigod." I was wearing a pair of castoff scrub pants from the NCIS autopsy. I had never before noticed that there were more than two pockets—the top of the side pocket would have been at just the right angle for the key to fall in while I was sitting behind the wheel, my hand resting on my leg. Lexi slipped her hand into the side pocket (a really weird sensation and she will never make a good pickpocket without a lot of practice) and pulled out the key to the Morgan. "Thank you," I said weakly, then, "Thank you," more fervently.
"Maybe we shouldn't tell Daddy," she suggested and I looked at her in surprise.
"Yeah," I finally agreed. "He'd probably think I need a keeper."