The Car Seat in Her Buick

He was fine. He was laughing. There was not a scratch on him anywhere, and the late sun was shining through the spray behind him, and he looked like the happiest little boy in South Dakota.

I picked him up anyway. He was soaking wet and I didn’t care. I held him against my work smock until he squirmed and said “Down, Mama, down,” and even then I held on a little longer.

Darlene came out onto the porch drying her hands on a dish towel. She was sixty-four, short gray hair, a sleeveless flowered blouse she had probably owned since I was in grade school.

“Well, you’re early,” she said. “I’ve got hot dogs on. He already had a Dilly Bar, so don’t let him tell you otherwise.”

“I know he did,” I said. “Megan told me.”

She stopped drying her hands. Just for a moment. Then she went right on, and folded the towel over her shoulder.

“That girl talks too much,” she said.

I walked past her to the garage. I knew what I was looking for before I opened the side door, and I hated that I knew it.

The Buick sat in the driveway, so the garage was mostly empty. The deep freeze hummed against the back wall. There was a pile of lawn chairs, a bag of water softener salt, and a blue tarp folded over something lumpy behind the freezer.

I pulled the tarp back. It was the car seat.

It was the one Ryan’s sister had passed down to us when Jack was born, a decent seat, and I had put it in Darlene’s Buick myself the week she started watching him. It was gray with dust. A mouse had been at one corner of the cover.

I turned it over and found the sticker on the bottom. Date of manufacture: March 2017. Do not use after: March 2023. It had been expired for three years, and I had never once thought to check. That part was on me.

But expired or not, it had been in the garage. Not in the car. Behind the freezer, under a tarp, where nobody would see it.

I carried it out into the driveway and set it on the concrete, and Darlene looked at it, and then she looked away at the sprinkler.

“How long has it been in there?” I asked.

“Oh, Kayla.”

“How long, Darlene?”

“A while,” she said. “Since about Easter. It was a pain getting him in and out of that thing. He screams. You know he screams.”

Since about Easter. I did the math without wanting to. Church on Sundays. The grocery store on Thursdays. The cemetery in Arlington on Memorial Day, twenty-some miles of highway each way.

“We never had those,” Darlene said. She said it the way people say the weather. “Not when I was little, and not much when Ryan was little either. You all turned out fine.”

I did not yell. I want to say that plainly, because I have thought about that evening a great deal since, and I am proud of very little about it, but I am proud of that.

I didn’t yell because Jack was standing right there in the grass with his giraffe, watching us both. And I didn’t yell because yelling at Darlene had never once worked for anybody, including her late husband, rest his soul.