Yesterday began like my summer Fridays have. I got up, made the girls breakfast, went to the gym. That sort of thing. Normal enough, but everything started to go to hell when Reg and I took the girls and their friend Jenny for ice cream.

A local ice creamer (inventing words here) is holding a special fund-raising event this weekend, offering a portion of its sales to benefit a man who was paralyzed in violent robbery last year. So after I got home from the gym and showered, I offered to take the girls out for cones with the secondary goal of checking out the special “All Heart” flavor. Reg drove with my keys (this detail will become an important point of contention later). We got the the ice cream place, and Reg and the girls jumped out of the car and left me sitting in the front seat digging in my big coupon folder for ice cream coupons (yes, I keep a coupon folder in my car, but this is not the point).

I found the coupons, got out of the car, pushed the lock, and closed the door. We ordered the girls’ cones, and I planned to pick up my pints on the way out. We sat on a grassy hill while the girls ate, and when we got up to leave Reg said, “the keys are in the car.”

Me: “Why?”

Reg, indignantly and as if this made perfect sense: “I set them down because I was getting out!”

Me: “Okay, why are you even trying to present that as normal. In whose world is it normal to set the keys down IN the car when you are getting out.!”

Reg: “They’re your keys!”

Me: “You couldn’t bother telling me that you were setting my keys down. You saw me digging in the coupon folder. Oh, but that’s right, you’re so godamned self-centered that anything I’m doing is completely not worth noticing. All I ask for is basic communication for Christ’s sake!”

Reg: “Why is this now about communication?”

Me: “Because you couldn’t even bother to speak a basic sentence to me. Because I am beneath your attention.”

Then we start thinking of who we can call, bearing in mind that the person will have to be able to fit three children and two adults in the vehicle. This means that we can’t call anyone who might have to bring his or her own children…

Dad. So I call and explain the situtation, “Can you help us?”

Dad: “Do I have a f**king choice? You’re just down over the hill, right? I’ve got guys on the roof here. I can’t be gone all f**king day.”

We wait for Dad, during which time I seriously ponder cancelling our upcoming vacation because I am married to the most self-centered and stupid man in the world who is so arrogant, he can’t even find the words “I’m sorry” or “it’s my fault” when clearly he’s the one who screwed up.

When dad comes, I buckle the kids in the back seat of his truck’s king cab. Reg and I  go to climb into the front with Dad, only to realize that we’re both not going to fit. Why? Because my father has constructucted what essentially amounts to a coffee table in the middle of the front seat of his truck. It’s a wooden built-in, bead board to be exact, stained and trimmed out with molding. This built in has several compartments, jigsawed to the perfect dimensions of each item Dad needs to have handy during truck operation: cell phone, water bottle, sunglasses, scanner, maps, pencils, paper.

I tell Reg, “You can ride in the bed.”

Gwennie: “Mommy, I’m worried about Daddy riding in the back of the truck.”

Me: “He’ll be fine. He’s lucky I’m not making him run behind the truck like the stupid goat that he is.”

Riding with Dad…”Uh, Dad, do you have a key for our house?”

Dad’s ensuing rant…”No. Do you mean to tell me that you’re locked out of the goddamned house too? What the hell is wrong with you? This is what you’re going to do, and don’t put this shit off. Tonight, you go down to the Home Depot, and you make a copy of your car key and you keep it in your wallet. I told you this shit last summer when you locked your keys in the car.”

“Dad, we can’t copy our car keys. They’re encoded or something.”

Dad’s rant part two…”That’s bullshit. I’ll figure that shit out with the guys at the club. Well, you go to the Home Depot and you make five copies of your house keys…one for me, one for your mother, one for your sisters, and hide the fifth one under a pot outside.”

“Wouldn’t under a pot be the first place someone would look?”

“Don’t be a smart ass, Lucy, I’ve got guys on my roof. And there’s all this construction and shit, and it’s going to take me all goddamned day to get home.”

We pull into the driveway…”Lucy, this [detached] garage is wide f**king open. Lemme get this straight, you can’t get in your car, you can’t get in your house, but some asshole can come along and steal all this shit out of your garage.”

“Dad, there’s like two razor scooters, five hula hoops, and a bag of potting soil in there. What’s to steal?”

“How are you getting into the goddamned house?”

By now, Reg is out of the truck, and we’re walking across the yard to the downstairs bathroom window, which has proven itself to be, in the past, the best breaking in point of the house. The girls start arguing over who gets to climb in, and I decide that Mira’s going.

I’m getting ready to pop the screen out, when suddenly, I feel a sharp stab in the bottom of my middle toe. A bee had flown into my flip flop and stung me. I crumpled to the ground and pulled out the stinger, moaning with stark remembrance of just how effing bad a bee sting hurts.

Reg disappears around the house only to emerge out the front door a few moments later.

Why? He’d left the back sliding door unlocked. More specifically, like he assumed I’d pick up the keys, he assumed I’d lock the door that he opened when I wasn’t even home.

At this point, my Dad had just decided to stop talking, but if you can imagine that he had a crawl, like the thingy at the bottom of the screen on CNN, it would say something like this: “Can’t get in the f**king car, f**king house and garage left wide f**king open…guys on my f**king roof…forty-f**king-one years old… master’s degree, my ass…going to Home Depot and make the f**king keys myself…”

But despite his fury and because I was hobbled, Dad offered to take Reg back to the car at the ice cream place. They ended up getting stuck in construction on the main route, at which point Dad said, “You can get out here” and left Reg out in middle of the road to walk the rest of the way to the car.

I never got my ice cream.