Elizabeth's Excellent Adventures -- Coffee Time, Part II

Ok.  When we last saw our intrepid explorer, her worst fear had apparently come true:  she had lost her keys somewhere.  And in my mind, I already was having to call a locksmith and one of two things would happen:

1. I would remain Liz, and endure ridicule and possible bodily harm when Bubba showed up to spring the car door, or
2. I'd call Bubba, then repair into the coffee-house bathroom, change into my drab other half, and wait for him to show up.  In front of the customers and baristas, who would know who I am in both incarnations, and I'd never be able to go back there again.

Before settling on door number 2, I decided to go into the coffee house and look around the comfy leather chair in which I'd been sitting, on the off-chance that the keys were there.  So I did: I walked over to the chair (thank goodness another customer hadn't since occupied it) and began to look around it on the floor, run my hands around the cushion edges, and etc.  One of the baristas -- the cute bald one with the neat goate -- asked what I'd lost, and I said, my keys, and he began to help me look.  Finally, I dropped down on my knees to look under the chair, and he proceeded to say: "Here, let me move it for you."
And I'd like to believe it was chivalry, and it might have been. He might have been one of those rare guys who treat you the way you obviously wish to be treated, gender-wise.  I know he knew I was trans: if he hadn't tumbled to it when I first came in, he surely did now.  My voice had grown increasingly unreliable as my panic had set in, and I'm sure my deportment wasn't of the highest caliber.  But he treated me as he would anybody else, and for that I am profoundly grateful.

Well.  The keys were not in or around the chair, so with a sense of impending doom, I moved on to the ladies room, the only other place I'd been.  I could feel Bubba's hot breath already -- I didn't see the keys anywhere in the small room.

Then, before I bowed to the inevitable, I decided to search my bag one more time, even though I'd been through it frantically out at the car.  I searched the front pocket I'd searched before ... nothing.  I searched the main compartment I'd searched before ... nothing.  Finally, I searched the capacious back pocket I'd searched before ... and somehow, there it was.  I was one relieved t-girl.