It was early on a sunny summer week day.  My husband was going to work.  He always pushed the bubble on the space/time continuum.  The screen door on the garage gave me a visual on the driveway when the garage door was open for business.  Our children were young and were milling about in various stages of undress.  There was no kiss goodbye or formality as he left the house for work.  I had only one eye open.  The other eye was pretending to be asleep.

Summer days were long days.  I approached each with the same grim determination of a battle weary soldier determined to move forward to the next fox hole under a cover of bullets.  Then, I heard it.  It was the sound of grinding metal on metal.  My husband was backing out of the driveway at about 45 m.p.h..  I looked out through the screen door at the driveway.  My husband’s car had already sped away.  My car, an old woody station wagon sat shining in the sun.  But, I saw that there were car parts…My Car Parts, on the driveway.

My second eye popped open and I ran out to investigate the damage.  His car was black, and the woody was white.  Out on the driveway in mix and match pajamas, barefooted, I saw the streak of black paint on the side of my car and worse yet, a torn quarter panel and bumper were like road kill on the driveway.  My temper surged!  I was a drill sergeant with the children.  I piled them into the car as they were, in a summer lack of attire.  I picked up the injured parts of my car and threw them into the back cargo hold.

I dared not speed, as my husband had.  But, I definitely gassed it up to a wheezing 15 m.p.h. on the road toward my husband’s office.  I was angry, and angrier.  The kids were excited because mommy was mad at daddy.  The youngest, a toddler, was excited all the time.

I pulled into the office parking lot and smiled when I saw his car there.  There was damage to his quarter panel and white paint by the damage.  I was on a mission.  I tossed my beloved cars’  parts into his car.  I dared not show myself in my state of fury and disarray.  We drove home.  Cottonwood trees lined that street and all of us sneezed repeatedly as we hurried along.

I parked the car back on the driveway.  All of us exited.  The neighbors were stirring and felt the tension in the air when they looked at us and the damaged car.  I was fueled by coffee and speed dialed his office.  Reaching him by phone was a long process.  I had to be patched through several desk phones until I reached him.  I left a blistering message on voice mail.  He was always in a meeting.  Women who worked there were not in pajamas at all.  They were freshly dressed in appropriate day wear, with hair and makeup done, and were wearing heels.  I hung up the phone and we began our arduous summer day.

I looked at my car occasionally and felt violated.  I filled a kiddie pool with water and a tad of bleach.  The kids mingled in our neighborhood.  Many mingled at our house.  I allowed ample sidewalk chalk, bubble stuff, and jump ropes.  I hurried to shower and dress.  I still use shampoo as the cleaning agent for my whole self.  It saves time.  The day passed as summer days do, with injuries requiring bandages, arguments between boys and girls just for the sake of it, The little boys pulled out their peters and peed on my flower bed.  The lawn mower was pulled out of the shed and a hose hooked up with a sprinkler.  Water and colored sidewalk chalk dripped down into the gutter.

My husband’s work schedule varied from sun up to sun down.  I tried to pull myself together at sun down.  The kids needed baths and got them.  They sat down and watched a Disney film for the 365th time.  It had been a long, hot day.  I cooked a dinner that included a meat substance.  The children hated mommy’s meat.  If it was not shaped like a dinosaur from the local fast food place they did not eat “real” meat.

Daddy missed our dinnertime most days.  I would heap a plate of over-cooked meat, potatoes, and limp carrots for him to find in the refrigerator.  He called pork chops “pork chips.” The kids picked over the foods on their plates and the toddler cruised around the table to pick morsels of food from other’s plates.  He had teethed on Oreo cookies.  I had a boatload of guilt over this.  That summer day was extra long. I was waiting for daddy.

I got the kids into pajamas and their beds, put away the toys scattered in colorful drifts around the house outside.  I wrestled the lawnmower and other items into the shed, and used the hose to wash down the driveway.  I always dumped the kiddie pool.  Impetigo and pink eye and bladder infections formed in the soup of water still left in the pool.

I waited like a spider in its web.  He was extra late that night.  I saw his headlights light up the garage.  I heard the music playing inside of his car.  I pounced when he came in.  “What the hell?”  I hissed.  “You hit my woody!  You drove away!”  I asked him:  “Did you see the parts of my car in your car?” He sighed that sigh so common as a response.  I was the untamed shrew he lived with for six to eight hours out of twenty-four hour days.  He looked in the refrigerator at my meal that I had cooked.  He acted like he was not hungry because of my fury.  In actuality he had already eaten at a fast food place on the way home.

“Yes.” was his reply.  He pulled out a beer.  I unleashed a stream of unconscious words, all foul, at him.  It was a hot summer night.  Sweat ran down the crack in my ass.  “Hit and run.  You had to see me run out onto the driveway in your rear view mirror!”  “I’m Sorry!” from him was not in his vocabulary that night.

I grabbed his car keys and switched them with mine.  “You can drive the woody for a while.” I said.  I did not dignify that with a “Good night.”  The woody was a science experiment inside.  Fast food bags with plastic toys, fries, melted shakes, mysterious pink goo, and a bad diaper or two was, I thought, fair.

He drove it to work the next day.  He had a meeting to attend with a well-groomed man who opened the door to the woody.  “I’ll drive!” he said.  So my woody baked in the sun in the parking lot.  In the meantime, I drove his car like we were in a demolition derby.  The kids joined the fun and the toddler pee peed on the front seat.  I felt satisfied when woody was returned, clean.  The damage was fixed.

All settled again as we approached August and developed strange skin rashes from the water in the kiddie pool.