The Car Seat in Her Buick

I had asked her before. That was the part that made my hands cold. Twice that spring I had said, “Please use the car seat, Darlene, even for short trips,” and twice she had smiled at me and said, “Of course, honey.”

The obvious thing was to take Jack home and never bring him back. I thought about it, standing there. I want to be honest that I thought about it hard.

But the only daycare in our town of 1,900 people had a waiting list of fourteen months. I had been on it since I was pregnant. The next closest one was in Brookings, forty miles each way, and it would have cost more than I make in a week.

And Darlene was the only sitter Jack had ever had. He called her Nana. He ran to her door every morning with his arms out. She read him the same tractor book forty times a day and never once acted tired of it.

She loved him. I never doubted that, not even standing in her driveway with that dusty seat. What I doubted was whether loving him was going to be enough on the day somebody ran the stop sign at Third.

I sat down on her porch steps, set Jack on my knee, and called Ryan.

Ryan drove a grain truck for the co-op that summer. That Tuesday he was hauling a load of last year’s corn up to Aberdeen, and he wouldn’t be home until close to nine. I could hear the diesel under his voice when he picked up.

“Hey, babe. You get him?”

“I got him,” I said. “Ryan, your mom has been driving him around on her lap. Since Easter. The seat’s been in the garage behind the freezer.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped. Out on that highway the signal comes and goes.

“Is he okay?” he finally said.

“He’s fine. He’s sitting right here eating grass.”

“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “I’ll call her right now.”

“Ryan, I’ve already talked to her twice. She smiles and says yes and does what she wants. If you call her, she’ll smile at you over the phone too.”

Another long quiet. I could picture him, one wrist over the wheel, staring down that long straight road with the sunflowers on both sides.

Ryan is a good man. He is not a big talker, and his mother has always been able to get around him, the way mothers can. But he is not a coward and he is not a fool, and when it counts, he listens.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I want her to keep watching him,” I said. “And I want him buckled every single time. I’m not going to scream at her. I’m just not going to give her a choice.”

“Then do what you need to do,” Ryan said. “I’m with you. Whatever it is, I’m with you. Tell Mom I said so.”

I stood up, carried Jack inside, and set him down in front of the cartoons. Darlene followed me into the kitchen. She had the hot dog tongs in her hand and she was holding them like she had forgotten what they were for.