The damn key fob was dead. There was no manual lock that I could find and even then, I wasn’t sure if the car would start without the remote juiced up. Fuck.
It was 3:45 pm. I was supposed to be picking up a pizza order that had been set for 3:40. I had class in an hour. It began to hit me how cold it was outside then, my ears and the strip of ankle exposed by my bunched jean leg alerting me to the crisp, icy breeze. My fingers warned me not to keep playing with the remote.
Feeling guilty about it, knowing that if she answers it’ll mean I woke her up from her pre-12 hour shift nap, I call my mom, hoping she’ll answer anyway. No dice. I call the house phone, since we still have a landline, and she often nags me to call that one instead when she’s home. No dice twice.
I have family locally, but none can help me then. My brother is out of state right now, my oldest sister profoundly unwell and with a COVID test scheduled for tomorrow, my other sister at work until 9 tonight.
There’s another cold breeze. I wonder, but I don’t check the temperature because a fat lot of good it’s gonna do me to know exactly how cold I am.
Feeling guilty again, I re-enter the Panera Bread, bypassing the QR code—contact tracing registration for indoor dining—as I avoid eye contact with the employee who took my coffee order and step into an alcove. I take my gloves off and search “what to do with dead key fob battery.” One article tells me that there might be enough juice left that if I hold it right next to the door, I can press the button that unlocks with proximity.
I exit the Panera, give that a shot, and very quickly return to my alcove when it fails. I return to google and read about On-Star warranties. I think my mom might have that? I call.
The Panera ambient music seems much louder than it did a moment ago—I exit, green paper coffee cup in hand, so I can hear them better and they me, but then the music is just as loud just outside the door. I stand awkwardly next to the drive-through lane as the same employee who gave me my coffee walks past to give a parked car their pick-up order. I walk out to stand next to the car again.
“-warranty expired in January of 2019-”
Well. I haven’t heard from mom still, and they promise to connect me to Chevy roadside assistance. My mom calls while I’m on hold and after ignoring it the first time, I hurriedly switch over. I’m always anxious about switching between calls on my phone, I feel like I’m going to hang up on accident. When she answers, I let her know why I called and that I’m on hold and I switch back.
I continue to be on hold. It continues to be cold. I return guiltily, once more, to the indoor warmth of Panera Bread.
The transfer goes through and once again Panera becomes loud. I step outside again and tell a nice lady my mom’s phone number and confirm the make and model of car and then she tells me it’s going to cost almost $80 for “lock-out” service with no warranty, is that alright?
I’m quite sad about this, but I confirm my credit card number and contact number, thank her and hang up.
I call my mom and in a voice that tells me I’m stupid without saying it, she reminds me about our triple AAA membership and tells me she’s going to try and call the pizza place to let them know I’m still on my way. Instead of my alcove, I’ve returned halfway to the space between the outer and inner door of Panera Bread at this point, and I sputter about needing to hang up so I can cancel the service.
It’s surprisingly easy—they sent me a text. I click the link that tells a man named David that I no longer need his services. I move to the inner door and return to my alcove and set the coffee down on a table. I call my mom again, this time facing the street-facing windows of the Panera, and as we talk, I remember where I am.
“Mom,” I interrupt our conversation about what happened to the triple AAA card I’m supposed to have as she describes where her card is inside the locked car, “there’s an AutoZone across the street.”
“You’re going to cross Saginaw Street?” she says. A busy, 5-lane road, at midday on a Monday.
“Yeah, it’ll be fine. I can be careful.”
“Are you sure?” she says, “you’re a young girl, you know. You should just go stand next to the car and look helpless and sad. Maybe cry even. If I were you, I’d do that and try to get the attention of every guy that came along until someone helped me.”
. . .
The sink is dripping.
We’ve cleared out the cabinet underneath it, have some towels folded over, and as my sister, my mom, and I stand in the kitchen looking down and through the open cabinet-door at the pipes, my mom says those four infuriating words.
“We need a man for this.”
You might have noticed that’s actually six words, but it was a deliberate choice to say four. I’ll explain why. Sometimes it’s “We need a man for that-” or “we need a man around for Jacari [my nephew, being raised in a single mother household like our own by my oldest sister]-” or “we need a man to plan this trip-” or “we need a man to carry this inside-” or “we need a man to fix-”
This door, this car, this sink—take your pick.
The way the sentence ends always varies, sometimes repeats in differing contexts, but it always starts the same way.
“We need a man-”
Do we, mom?
. . .
I shift my gaze from the windows to the wall that’s also in front of me and decidedly do not unpack that.
“Mom,” I say, “I’m not you. I try too much to look capable, okay?” I want to be capable. ”And I can do this! It’s just crossing the street.”
“Well, be careful. Look both ways and watch the light and-”
“I know, I know. I’ll be careful, I know-”
“-and call the pizza place, too, actually. My phone’s screen went black so I can’t search their number and I can’t find it on the ad papers we’ve got either.”
“Oh, ok. Yeah I’ll do that first.”
“And be careful. I’m gonna try to lay back down.”
“Of course. Sleep well, I love you.”
We hang up. I assure the pizza place I still plan to pick up our order. I zip my coat all the way, put my phone back in my pocket, put my gloves back on, and pick up the coffee. For the fourth or fifth time, I exit the Panera. Again, it overlaps with that same employee carrying an order out, but this time I hesitate and catch her attention to apologize about my loitering. If I were her, I think I’d be curious about the lady who keeps walking in and out with the coffee she just ordered to-go.
“Don’t worry about it,” she tells me, “dine-in is open and it’s cold out there. You’re fine!”
Warmed by this small kindness and finding my guilt mildly assuaged, I return to the carside and look across the road. Conveniently, there are already foot-steps through the snow next to the parking lot. I follow it to a section of lower, packed down snow, and remember the strange little sidewalk that runs from this lot of stores towards downtown Grand Blanc. I look away from the direction of town and back to the street.
Left, right, check the light. Right, left, check the light again. Cars rush past and I wait, coffee in hand.
Finally, it clears enough that I make it to the turn-lane, but I have to pause as some cars turn out of the driveway of a neighboring business to the AutoZone.
Left, right, check the light. Right, left, check the light again. My long ankle-reaching coat keeps me warm but constricts my stride and with my free hand I reach down and bunch it up a little so I can walk faster. When I reach the drive for AutoZone, there’s another set of convenient footprints through the snow and I follow them into the parking lot and then through the doors.
There’s no one at the check-outs, so I beeline for the nearest one, set my coffee down and open with this: “as you might notice from the coffee cup, I just came from Panera. I crossed the street because my key fob’s dead and I’m locked out of my mom’s car. Any chance you could help?”
Two men come to my assistance and I think with distaste of what my mom said on the phone. At least I chose to do this.
The older of the two men greets me and takes the keys from me while his co-worker leaves to find the appropriate battery.
The mask is slipping off his nose as he gestures me around to the side of the counter to watch him replace the battery. He looks like an off-brand Anthony Fauci and the dissonance of this behavior strikes me as I step around. I adjust my mask and look to his hands as he demonstrates how he opened the fob and switched the battery.
Afterward, he hands me the keys back. His co-worker says something should light up now that the new battery is in, but we don’t see anything. We hem and haw for a moment over whether or not it’ll work, but decide we’re too far out of range to test it. Mr. Fauci gestures me over to a separate cash register to purchase my replacement batteries. They were out of single packs, so I had to buy a double, but the total still comes to a much more satisfying $8.
The card-thing beeps, alerting me to remove my card.
“That sound means you’re a million dollars!”
“Aw, thank you,” I tell him sincerely, “I appreciate it.”
“I’m sure it’s true. Actually, if you’ve got people who love you and care about you, you’re priceless.”
“That’s a really sweet sentiment, thank you.” I smile behind the mask.
“Now, be careful crossing the street again. Saginaw Street can be wild.”
I nod and assure him that I will.
“No, really, “ he emphasizes, “I got a big SUV. I can go 80.”
Bemusedly, thinking that he really shouldn’t be driving that fast on Saginaw whether he has a big SUV or not, I reassure him once more and leave the store, coffee and keys in hand.
. . .
Having crossed the street again, I stand carside once more. I hold the key fob next to the door. I press the button.
Nothing.
Disappointment. Mild panic. It is now nearly 5pm. All that, I think, and I still have to call Triple AAA? I feel guilty again about standing in Panera as the cold seeps in and the dusting of snow resting on everything blows around my face, finding every bit of exposed skin. Guilty about waking my mom up from her nap. Guilt about the fact that I’m going to miss my discussion section. Brief longing for the pizza that I should’ve been eating an hour ago.
. . .
Though I never heard the words from her own mouth during the years in which our lives overlapped, I’ve heard my mom repeat them enough times since her death that I can recite them at will.
“Why bother with all that?” My grandma evidently told my mom constantly as she grew up, all that being trying at school, going to college, working for herself, and more. “You’re just gonna grow up and marry a shoprat.”
Instead, my mom left home at 16 when they threatened to kick her out for talking to black people. She lived on her own, walked to work, finished high school. She went to college and raised my older siblings on her own on a shoestring budget until she graduated and became a registered nurse.
When she did marry my dad, he wasn’t a shoprat, but a computer programmer, and when he didn’t do right, she divorced him. She moved, she worked, and she supported herself and her kids. She bought the nice, suburban, 2-floor home we live in on her own in 03’. She bought the 04’ Impala that I used to drive brand-new the next year and paid in full with cash. She drove it, my older sister drove it, I drove it. When there was another man she dated seriously enough that he moved in with us and then one day, he didn’t do right? She evicted him when he refused to move and she partially renovated the house after.
In all my life, she’s been a self-sufficient single mom. It’s like the words bubble out of her, unthinkingly, “we need a man-”
No, mom. We don’t.
You never did.
. . .
Wait. Did they…? I flash back to the older man, Mr. Fauci, asking his co-worker, “does it go in this way?” And getting a “yeah, that’s what it usually looks like,” answer. They snap the key fob shut and hand the keys back. I trust them and complete my purchase.
I stand next to the car and realize they popped the old battery out and didn’t pay attention to which way it was supposed to go.
Entering Panera again and ignoring the QR code on the door, I return to my alcove and set the coffee on the table in front of me. I google some extremely stupid questions about batterries that I won’t repeat here. Carefully, I flip open the side key thing so I can reach the seams of the key fob. The older man’s instructions echo in my head.
“It’s a real simple pressure pop. Get in here with a tiny screwdriver or something like that and just push up and it’ll come right off. Then switch the battery and snap it back on.”
I look at my nails. Something like that.
I get it open and I flip the battery around.
Without even properly snapping it closed again, I exit the Panera and walk until I can see the car. I press the lock button and the taillights flash. YES!
. . .
When I finally get into the car, heat blasting, and drive home, when I’ve picked up the pizza and even when I enter the house: my feet are still numb.
Cherish Dean | February 15th, 2021 | Grand Blanc, MI