“Can You Hear Me Now?”

“Can You Hear Me Now?”

Unaccustomed to a vehicle that doesn’t rattle apart at 65 miles per hour and with the addition of the car’s butter leather interior and electric butt warmers, I felt like a queen as my new Subaru glided onto the interstate behind my husband’s Jeep.

The euphoria did not last long.

We had barely made it out of the city where we had purchased the vehicle when a pebble kicked up behind my husband’s rear tire and cracked my windshield. The crack was only about the size of my thumbnail, but it was in my line of vision and my jubilant mood quickly turned sour.

I tried calling my husband’s cell phone to tell him the news and saw that I had no service. At a stop light I rolled my window down and waved my left arm. But he did not see me. We drove for about thirty more minutes when Baby Girl became bored with the scenery and decided to use my bladder like a trampoline. I pulled over at a gas station and waited for Randy to put on his right blinker. Thinking that he had seen me, I parked and trotted into the gas station. I used the restroom, refilled my water bottle and purchased a granola bar–taking my time as I was in no hurry to cram my seven-month-pregnant stomach behind a steering wheel.

When I came outside, I looked right and I looked left, but Randy’s vehicle was nowhere. I didn’t panic too badly as I figured he was parked up the road waiting for me. Climbing into the car, I pulled out of the gas station and drove for a few miles while keeping my eyes peeled for his white Jeep.

Nothing.

I still did not have any cell phone service and did not know how to get home from that location, so I swerved across two lanes of traffic into a seedy-looking gas station and walked across the parking lot. Feeding quarters into the pay phone, I listened to the operator requesting for me to “please hang up and try again.” I did as she suggested, but the pay phone still wouldn’t work.

My heart started pounding. I searched the road again for Randy’s white Jeep. In the turning lane there was one exactly like his, but when the light turned green and the vehicle pulled out of the glare of the setting sun, I saw it was being driven by a blue-haired lady with a beehive hairdo.

Definitely not my husband.

Trying to squelch my fear, I waddled back toward my vehicle while sticking out my stomach as a means of soliciting compassion and asked a nice-looking lady if I could use her cell phone. She asked what the number was and punched it in. Clenching it in her hand in case I had a hormonal inclination to snatch it, she placed it on speakerphone and we both listened as it went straight to my husband’s voicemail.

He had no service either.

I thanked her and returned to my new car with the butter leather interior and cracked windshield. Oblivious to both, I cranked the engine and pulled back onto the road.

I drove to the first gas station where I had gotten separated from Randy, rested my head on the steering wheel and began to cry. Even more frustrated by my sniveling than the situation, I hissed at myself to get a grip and marched into the gas station. I asked the attendant if he had a map that I could borrow. He mumbled something and pointed to the back wall. I walked back there and looked at the map that was not the shape of the state I was expecting.

“I’m in Kentucky?!” I cried right as a burly guy exited the restroom and gave me a scared look.

Once back in my car, I started driving north while praying I would miraculously download a mental GPS that would navigate me home. I drove east while blinking back tears and wiping my sweaty hands on the leather seat. I drove west while yelling at myself for my stupidity and threatening to chuck my cell phone out the window for not having any service. While driving south, I accidentally hit my windshield wipers when assaulting the steering wheel but did not know how to turn them off.

Peering through my windshield through a haze of hysterical tears, I saw my husband’s dusty white Jeep parked next to the pay phone that I had tried to call him from forty-five minutes before. His driver’s side door was standing wide and he had the phone crunched between his ear and shoulder while I am sure he listened to that operator requesting for him to “please hang up and try again.”

Laying on the horn with a mixture of relief and panic that he would leave before I could cross the two lanes of traffic, Randy turned and saw me in our “new” Subaru Forester with the wipers whipping back and forth across a cracked, completely dry windshield.

Over an hour and a half had past since we’d become separated from each other. With our reunion, my survival mode fell away and I started crying and babbling as I jammed the vehicle into park and maneuvered my belly out from behind the steering wheel. Randy hugged me and rested one hand on my heaving stomach. I could feel his body trembling from the stress of having misplaced his wife and baby in one fell swoop.

“I thought you saw me pull over,” I sobbed. “You put on your blinker and everything.”

Randy shook his head. “No, I just looked in my rearview mirror and you were gone. I went back up to the interstate to see if I could find you.”

“I headed this way,” I said.

After my tears and Randy’s stress had subsided and we had climbed into our separate vehicles to continue the long journey home, I thought of how our separation was an analogy for the necessity of communication in marriage: We had both started in the same direction, but over time outside influences had caused us to enter upon different paths that made us lose sight of each other. Only because we had refused to continue forward until the other had been found were we able to reclaim our union.

Yep, it was a great analogy for communication in marriage, but it sure would’ve been a whole lot easier just to have cell phone service.