The sun lingered in the parking lot long enough to lean against my van and point with a pale finger: Look, lady -- flat tire.

Sure enough, my tire wasn't just a little flat. In the time it had taken me to run into Best Buy, the tire puddled and oozed into a black pool on the asphalt. Other shoppers milled past. The street lights buzzed on. Typical.

Why is it that my car turns traitorous every time my husband ships out? Even if it is only for a few days? The lawn will cling to life. The large appliances promise to die only one at a time. But the minute my husband leaves the state, the cars embrace the first nervous breakdown they can find.

So what am I supposed to be learning here? Since I have only had four flat tires in my life and they have all occurred while Brad was at sea, maybe the universe is trying to tell me that Brad spends way too much time at sea. Or not. But what else is there to learn?

The first time I got a flat, I thought it was one more way my young husband was letting me down. Even though a guy in a pickup knelt in the slush and changed my tire, I still drove away thinking that a good husband would have been there to help me himself. I don't think that was the lesson I was supposed to learn.

A few years later a second tire gave out on me in my own driveway. I was a lot more grown up then -- grown up enough to curse the guy who tightened my lug nuts with one of those air powered doo-dads. But I found that my handy dandy sledge hammer pounding on the tire iron loosened those babies real quick. From that I learned to keep a sledge hammer in my trunk.

The third time I got a flat just outside Little Creek base. A master chief in uniform changed my tire so fast I didn't actually have to stop the car. I tried to slip him a few bucks, but he wouldn't take it. “You've got the sticker,” he said, pointing to my windshield. From that I learned that maybe the Navy really does take care of its own.

And this time? This time just as I was laughing at myself for not being able to figure out where the spare was hidden, a guy in a uniform shirt came out of Best Buy. “Need help with that, Ma'am?” he called.

I thought about that one for a second. I could change the stupid tire myself. I had the diagram that came with the tire iron. I had a cell phone to call a truck. I had a credit card. And yet, here stood another good guy just as willing to kneel in the slush, just as willing to coach from the sidelines, just as willing to whip off a tire quicker than Jeff Gordon's pit crew. Here stood yet another good man, a man just like my own husband, offering to do this nasty job and not expecting anything but the opportunity to demonstrate how the world works. Wonderous.

“Do you have time?” I asked the guy. “You have no idea how much I would appreciate it.”