The Car Seat in Her Buick

Darlene came out the front door with Jack on her hip. He had a Popsicle stain down his shirt and his giraffe clamped under one arm. When he saw me he kicked his legs and yelled, “Mama! Mama car!”

“Not Mama’s car, buddy,” I said. “Nana’s car. I’m fixing Nana’s car.”

Darlene didn’t say hello. She walked down the steps and stood beside the Buick, a few feet back from the open door, with Jack on her hip and her free arm crossed over her stomach. She was wearing the flowered blouse again, with cropped pants and flip-flops.

Next door, her neighbor Herb had come out to his fence in a gray work polo, and he stood there with his arms folded, watching.

I set the box on the driveway, cut the tape with my car key, and pulled out the seat. It still smelled like the factory. I peeled off the plastic and set the manual on the roof of the Buick where I could see it.

Then I opened her back door, closed her keys in my fist so I wouldn’t lose them in the gravel, and knelt down on the door frame.

First the base. I set the seat rear-facing on the back seat behind the passenger side, because that way I could see it from the driver’s door, and so could she. I checked the bubble on the side. It floated just inside the blue line for a child his age.

The manual said a rolled towel under the front edge was all right if the angle needed help. It didn’t. The Buick’s seat was flat enough. I was glad of that. I wanted nothing in that car that looked like a shortcut.

Then the belt. I fed the shoulder and lap belt through the belt path, pulled it all the way out until it ratcheted, and buckled it. Click.

I glanced up. Darlene was watching my hands. Her face did not move.

Then I put my knee in the shell of the seat and leaned my weight into it, the way the manual showed, and pulled the belt up through the seat with both hands until it wouldn’t give anymore. My knee sank into the cushion of her back seat. The belt made a long ratcheting sound as it locked.

The keys in my fist jingled every time I pulled. Jack thought that was the funniest thing he had ever heard, and he laughed and laughed.

When I couldn’t pull it any tighter, I took my knee out, grabbed the seat right where the strap ran through it, and shook it hard. Side to side, then front to back.

It moved maybe a quarter of an inch. That is the rule, the one every fire department and every car seat class will tell you: grab it at the belt path, and if it moves less than one inch in any direction, it is in right.

I did it three more times, because I am who I am. It didn’t move.

Twenty minutes, it took me, start to finish. Twenty minutes in July with the sun on my back and my hair coming out of its ponytail. And in twenty minutes, Darlene didn’t say one single word. Not a sniff, not a sigh. Just watching, and Herb watched from his fence.

I wiped the keys on my smock.