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True Life Stories: NIGHT in the PARKING LOT
by Joyce Maynard

Domestic Affairs Column, 1985

Early last winter (it was just before Christmas) Audrey, who was then age six, flew by herself to visit grandmother in Canada. It's a trip she's made often, ever since she reached the age at which airlines permit children to fly alone (and, in truth, a little before then.) It's a direct flight: my motherputs her on the plane, and of course either Steve or I always picks her up at the other end.

This time she'd been gone about five days, and I was missing her badly -- couldn't wait to see her coming off the plane. I guess I was in a pretty keyed-up state: a combination of excitement at seeing Aud, and Christmas, which is a holiday that I love (as I keep reminding myself), even though I'm generally in tears at least once a day throughout the month of December.

This particular December day, I'd had a fight with Steve a few hours earlier. I can't even remember anymore what it was about, but I know my themes well enough that I can guess. He wasn't talking to me enough. He had fallen asleep on the couch again. He had slept through all three times Willy woke up in the night. The only compliment he'd given me in two days was for taking the trash to the dump. He was showing all the signs that he was planning to give me a knife sharpener for Christmas, or else maybe a coffee maker. -- an increasingly common phenomenon, during this period.

When I set out in mid-afternoon for the hundred mile drive to the airport, we hadn't made up. I didn't really mind the drive: I had brought with me a bunch of tapes of bluegrass music -- a category my husband never liked -- and I was looking forward to listening to them quietly in the car, by myself, followed by a few hours of shopping in the city on my own, before before Audrey's plane got in.

At Faneul Hall Market, I bought a few toys for the children and three dozen bagels for the freezer. When I looked at my watch I realized I had cut things a little closer than usual, but still, I knew, there was enough time to pick up our car, drive to the airport, and retrieve Audrey. As I walked to the parking lot, I said out loud -- superstitiously -- how much I loved her, and how lucky I was to have a daughter.
But when I got to the car, put down the packages, and reached into my purse for the car keys, I couldn't find them. I checked again, and then I checked my pockets. I checked again, checked the ground around the car. I raced back to the toy store I'd been shopping in: no keys. No keys at the bagel stand. And now I had less than an hour before Audrey's plane was due to land. I knew the keys might be in the car (it was too dark to see) and they might be in the snow somewhere between the parking lot and the shops. But there was no more time to look. So I hailed a taxi and told the driver to take me to Logan airport, fast. I had only ten dollars left in my wallet. The fare came to five.

I got to Audrey's gate with just five minutes to spare. I made a call to the Boston police, who told me they couldn't get a car like mine open and stared without seriously damaging the ignition, and in any case it might be a few hours before they could get around to me. I called Steve -- told him what was happening, and explained that I'd be home late.

Then I caught a glimpse of Audrey, who was carrying an enormous box holding a Barbie Dream Carriage (her early Christmas present from my mother) and a couple of shopping bags besides. Of course I threw my arms around her first. Then I explained about the car.

Neither of us had eaten dinner, but I figured we'd better use our last five dollars to get back to the car and try again to find the keys, or someone who could get the car open. It was around seven-thirty by this time, and below freezing, with a stiff wind.

To save money, I thought we'd try and share a cab. There was a friendly, kind-looking man in the taxzi line, so I asked if he might like to split a fare. The man -- Ned was his name -- said sure.

In the taxi, Audrey told him our story, leaving out nothing (not the bagels, or the Barbie coach either). And it turned out that this fellow (a nice-looking man, about my age, early thirties) was an engineer who'd just flown in to set up a machine he'd invented for MIT. Just our luck, his briefcase was full of tools.

"I'll come with you to the parking lot," he said. "I'll get your car open."

I said okay; and Audrey (always ready to make a new friend) jumped up and down on the seat, announcing, "This is great! This is just great!" I suggested she could wait inside the parking lot attendant's booth, where it was warm and there was a television set, but she didn't want to miss anything. So she sat on the hood of the car, bundled up in extra clothes she'd pulled out of her suitcase, and leaned over Ned's shoulder munching a bagel while he laid out his tools on the roof and analyzed the situation.

With his special miniature flashlight beamed in through the windshield, Ned found out the keys were in the ignition. Then he took a coat hanger out of his garment bag, twisted it, and attached a screwdriver to one end. Then he attached some wire so he could maneuver the screwdriver, sort of like a fishing line, from outside the window. The whole thing became pretty elaborate.

It didn't work. An hour had passed now, and my fingers were numb. "Maybe I should just leave the car and call a friend in Cambridge to pick us up," I said. Audrey and Ned protested. "I'm going to get this thing open," Ned said.

He built a second invention. Audrey told him her long-time ambition -- to be an inventor. He told her about inventions he‘d cooked up when he was a little boy.

We talked about all sorts of things while he worked on our car. He told funny stories about taking apart people's stereos all the time, and Audrey told him about her trip to Canada. She mentioned what a good pie baker I am. He mentioned how much he loved pies.

I was aware, through all of this, of the fact that my husband's name hadn't come up. I had a child, and obviously she had a father, but after a couple of hours, when the fact still hadn't emerged that I had a husband back home (and two little boys, whose car seats were plainly visible in the back), it occurred to me that maybe Ned thought I was divorced, and available.

He was a really attractive man. Just the sort of person with whom -- if I'd met him at the airport, before I met Steve -- I would have been happy to have dinner. It was very easy and natural talking with him. He gave me his scarf and hat when he noticed I was cold. He paid attention to Audrey.

Now comes the part that ‘s hard to admit: That there came a point, somewhere along the line, when I began consciously avoiding mention of Steve and my two little boys back home. Not that I planned to head off into the night with Ned (and Audrey, and the Barbie Dream Carriage). Not that I planned anything more than a handshake, and maybe a gift, in the mail, of some home-baked Christmas cookies. But if I am honest I would have to say I liked holding on to the image -- for a few minutes anyway -- that I was a young single mother, being cared for, and, I supposed, courted by a kind and somewhat dashing inventor who knew how to talk to children and told me I could make standing in a parking lot for two hours on a night with a windchill factor of negative ten degrees feel like fun.

Twice, while Ned worked on our car, a couple of men came up to see if they could help. One of them even appeared, for a second there, to be making some progress with the lock. I thought I saw, when that happened, how much Ned wanted to be the one to get our car door open.

Which he did, finally, by taking off a window, using the coathanger to lower in a towel to remove four interior screws, in a procedure that was (as I told Ned) nothing less than brilliant.

"Now," said my daughter (who is always up for a party), "we have to take you out to dinner. To celebrate."

It was ten o'clock by now. I explained, with embarrassement, that we were out of money. "Don't be silly," Ned told us. "This is my treat. And though I protested that we really had to get home, Audrey was starved and so was I. And I needed to warm up before the long drive home in a car with one window missing.

So we went to a restaurant that served enormous hamburgers, and Audrey had a sundae, and we all talked a lot more. I was surprised at how much there was to say that had nothing to do with my marriage and my family. Ned told us this was the best evening he'd had in months. And then, just after our second cup of coffee, I got up and said I'd better call Steve and tell him why we were so late.

saw the look on Ned's face when I said that. Now it seems just about unavoidable to conclude that I was leading him on -- toying with his affections, giving him reason to hope that things might turn out the way they would in certain highly romantic movies, where the man, the woman (a widow, probably) and the child (Shirley Temple) walk off hand in hand and become, instantly, a family.

It was late. Ned had been very kind. There was no danger, anymore, of my being misundertood. So I told him I'd drive him to his hotel before we set out for the long drive home. When we got into the car and I turned on the ignition, my obscure tape of obscure bluegrass music clicked on, Ned shook his head.

"I never met anybody else who listens to this," he said. It turned out he played banjo.

By the time I pulled up beside Ned's hotel, Audrey was asleep. "Be sure and say goodbye for me," he said. I shook his hand and said, "If you're ever in New Hampshire..." He picked up his briefcase and then closed the door very carefully, so as not to wake Audrey.

The next morning I told Steve what had happened. Later that day (setting out for the grocery store with Charlie and WIlly), I found, on the floor of the car, a package belonging to Ned, and called the hotel where he was staying. It turned out to be a crucial piece for the machine he was installing at MIT. I said I'd send it Express Mail that day. He called me back, to thank me, and to say he had been thinking about me. He wrote to me once, after that, saying it would be nice to get together in Boston, sometime when he came into town again. He had some records he'd like to tape for me.

I didn't write back.

Author's note: This story was originally published in my "Domestic Affairs" column, back in 1986, and later included in my collection of columns of the same name, published by Times books in 1986. A dozen years later, when I was divorced and living in California, a message showed up on the discussion forum of my website, written by a man who said he'd met me years before, in a parking lot near Logan Airport, when he helped me get into my locked car. He asked if I remembered the night, and of course I remembered it well.

Visitors to the website -- many of whom had been longtime readers of my old column -- instantly recognized the author of this message to be Ned, and by the time I got online myself, to answer him, a half dozen messages had been posted, by these women -- hard core romantics, now convinced that he and I were destined to re-meet and, now that I was available, go off into the sunset together, as we had been unable to do that long-ago night.

I was a little more restrained, myself, in my response to the author of this message, but I confess that I, too, felt a stirring of my heart when I read his words to me, all those many years later. I gave him my email address, with the thought that we might continue our communication in a somewhat less public fashion. "Tell me what you've been doing," I asked him.

He wrote back immediately. He told me that the invention he'd come to MIT to install that cold December day, whose patent he'd held, had become a huge success. Modestly, he acknowledged that it had made him a great deal of money -- enough that he no longer had to work full time. He had bought a place in the country, on a lake, and though he still traveled around sometimes, consulting, he was surprisingly free of conventional work obligations.

"That night I met you and your daughter proved life changing for me," he wrote. "Up until that day, I never thought I had any interest in becoming a parent. But after watching you and Audrey together, I knew I wanted a child."

Several years later, he had one. He and his daughter's mother had never married, and their relationship had been uneasy, and was still. But the little girl -- now exactly the age Audrey had been the night he and I met -- was the great joy of his life.

We corresponded briefly after that. He sent me a CD of songs he loved -- unusual songs, by little-known musicians, though many of them were favorites of mine too.

Then he and I said goodbye again. That was almost ten years ago. I no longer know where he is, but will always wish him well, and strange to say, I will remember the night in the parking lot as one of the happiest times I've known.