The Car Seat in Her Buick

“Okay,” I said. “Now I want to show you the harness, so you can do it without me. Can I have him for a minute?”

She handed Jack over without a word. He went stiff as a board, the way toddlers do, and I bent him into the seat and talked to him about the tractor across the street until he forgot to fight me.

“Straps come out of the slot at his shoulders or a little below, when he’s facing backward,” I said, more to Darlene than to Jack. “Not above. And the chest clip goes right here, even with his armpits. Not down on his belly.”

I pulled the harness snug, then pinched the strap at his collarbone. My fingers slid right off the webbing. “If you can pinch a fold of strap here, it’s too loose. If you can’t, it’s right.”

Darlene leaned in. She was close enough now that I could smell her perfume, the same one she wore to church, the one from the department store in Sioux Falls she drove to once a year at Christmas.

Then I snapped the buckle shut.

It was just a click. A plastic tongue sliding into a red plastic buckle, the most ordinary sound in the world. Every mother in America hears it a hundred times a week.

At the click, Darlene made a sound I had never heard from her. Not a word. A small sound, low in her throat, like somebody had stepped on her foot in the dark.

I looked up. Her face had gone a color I did not like, the gray of old dishwater, and her hand had come up flat against her chest.

“Darlene?”

She reached past me without asking, unbuckled Jack, and lifted him out of the seat. Her hands knew exactly where the red button was. They didn’t fumble at all. She set him down on the grass by the driveway with his giraffe and pointed him at the cat.

“Go see Smokey, honey,” she said. “Go on. Go pet Smokey.”

Jack toddled off across the yard after the cat, who wanted nothing to do with him.

Then Darlene sat down on the back seat of her Buick, right beside the car seat I had just installed. She sat sideways with her feet out on the driveway, the way you sit in a car when you are not going anywhere.

She put two fingers on the red buckle and pressed it, very lightly, like she was checking whether it was hot.

Her hand was shaking.

“Kayla,” she said. “There’s something Ryan doesn’t know.”

I didn’t say anything. I stood in the open door with my hands on the roof of her car and waited.

“Ryan had a sister,” she said. “Before him. Before Michelle, too. A little girl.”

The mower down the block stopped. I remember that, because the quiet came down all at once, and I could hear Jack talking nonsense to the cat across the yard.

“Her name was Amy,” Darlene said. “Amy Lynn. She was eleven months old.”

I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I left them on the roof of the Buick. The metal was still warm from the sun.

“Dale and I were twenty-two and twenty-four,” she said. “We were renting a farmhouse outside Marshall, over in Minnesota. January of 1984. We were driving home from his folks’ place after Sunday dinner.”