Telling your husband that you've gotten into a car accident that's your fault, is a lot like being in high school and telling your mother that you got a D on a French test. Brace yourself.
ME: "I got into an accident."
Pause. Now, I know he knows that I'm OK because I sound OK. I'm not in a coma--in fact, it sounds like I'm driving past the 405 on my way to Starbucks--which I am. Regardless, he knows he HAS to ask...
MIKE: "Are you okay?"
He's got to do the right thing...even though he doesn't want to. I can hear the tension in his neck-like a gear tightening--click click click...
MIKE: "Was it your fault?"
He must have ESP. That's another thing that happens the longer you're married. You just know that...
ME: "Yes. It was my fault."
Gulp.
And here's where I regress. I'm fifteen all over again. 'Yes mom! I did fail the French test! But so did everyone in my class! Everyone failed! It was the hardest test in the history of french tests...it was...'
ME: "Really small. We were going, like, literally two miles an hour. Actually, the scrape on my car isn't even a scrape. It's just rubber residue. You can just rub it off. It probably doesn't even need to go into a body shop."
In fact, it wasn't an accident at all. It was a love tap, a massage...it was practically calming for each car to make this connection. In fact, it might have been necessary, even fateful. Bashert.
Now, this is all good until it's time for me to present my...uh...work. It's about 9pm, we're in a parking lot and I'm almost giddy with excitement at how absolutely minor this boo boo is.
ME: "See? It's nothing."
He's seemingly convinced.
MIKE: "Yeah. It looks fine. We'll just have to take it to the body shop and have them...look...at..."
He's skulking around the front of the car. He then squints his eyes like Vincent D'Onofrio in Law and Order Special Victim's Unit...like he's discovered the murderer's bloody footprint.
MIKE: "Your bumper's crooked."
OMG. It is absolutely NOT crooked.
ME: "No it's NOT. It's fine."
He then proceeds to walk around the hood, placing one hand in between the hood and the bumper and then doing the same thing on the other side.
ME: "Why are you 'finger measuring' the hood? What is that accomplishing?"
MIKE: "The distance between that one edge of the hood and the other edge of the hood. THE WHOLE FRONT OF YOUR CAR IS OUT OF ALIGNMENT!"
I've failed french class. I'm in HUGE trouble.
From then on out, my teeny tiny fender bender has become a full blown wreck. Totaled. It'll never be the same and it'll cost our life savings to repair this car to say nothing of the teeny tiny scrape on the car that I hit that, presumably, has now become as bad as an IED.
When you've been married to a man long enough, you realize that he's perfect when it comes to cars--despite the time he smacked the back of his car into a pole in a parking lot or the billion times he's scraped the rims of my car on the curb and bashed the edge of my tires when he's doing a crappy parallel parking job.
I have now formulated a different answer for his initial, obligatory question, "Are you okay?" An answer that will be even more different tomorrow after I go to the body shop and find out he's right.

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