The Car Seat in Her Buick

Her Buick keys hung on a hook by the back door, on a ring with a little brass cross and a plastic tag from the Legion auxiliary. I had seen them there every weekday for two years.

I took them off the hook and put them in the pocket of my smock.

“Kayla,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll bring these back when there’s a car seat in your car,” I said. “A new one. I’ll buy it and I’ll put it in myself.”

“You can’t take my keys.”

“I’m not taking them for good. Just until the seat is in.” Without the keys the Buick could not leave her driveway, and that was the only reason I could leave Jack in her kitchen at all. I kept my voice low, because of the cartoons. “Until then I will drive you anywhere you need to go. Church. The grocery store. Bingo. The cemetery. Anywhere you say.”

“I’m sixty-four years old,” she said. “I have been driving since I was fourteen on my daddy’s farm. I don’t need my son’s wife to drive me to bingo.”

“I know you don’t,” I said. “And Ryan says he’s with me. He asked me to tell you.”

That landed. I watched it land. Her chin came up, and her mouth went tight, and for a second she looked like she was going to cry or throw the tongs at me, and I honestly didn’t know which.

She did neither. She turned around and went back to the stove.

“The hot dogs are getting burnt,” she said to the wall. “You might as well eat one.”

I ate a hot dog. I didn’t want it, but she had made it, and I was not going to leave her house that night with nothing between us but a set of keys. Jack ate two and dropped half of the second one for her cat.

When we left, Darlene stood on the porch and waved to Jack the way she always did. She did not wave to me. I didn’t blame her.

I buckled Jack into his own seat in my car and checked the harness twice, and then I sat behind the wheel in her driveway with her keys heavy in my pocket and shook for a while before I could start the engine.

That night after Jack was asleep, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and read about car seats until midnight. I had installed his first two myself, but I wanted to be sure, because I was about to do it in front of the most doubtful audience in the county.

I read the state law, which is not as strict as you would think. I read the pediatricians’ advice, which is stricter. Rear-facing as long as the seat allows. At least until two, and longer if the child still fits, because a little one’s neck is not ready for a hard stop.

Jack was two. He still fit rear-facing with room to spare. I decided he would ride backward in Darlene’s Buick for as long as the seat let him, and I didn’t care how much he complained about not seeing the road.

Ryan came in at a quarter after nine, smelling like corn dust and diesel. He looked at the laptop and at me and at the keys sitting on the table with the little brass cross.