The Car Seat in Her Buick
She kept her fingers on the buckle the whole time she talked. She didn’t look at me once. She looked at the seat.
“It was icy. It wasn’t even bad, not for January. A man in a pickup came through the stop sign at the county road. He said after that he never saw it. I believe him. The snow was piled so high on the corners that year.”
“He hit my side, the back. Right where she was.”
She stopped. I waited. Across the yard, Jack had given up on the cat and was sitting in the grass pulling clover.
“She was in a car seat,” Darlene said. “A good one. Dale’s mother bought it for us at Sears, and I was so proud of it. Nobody we knew had one. People laughed at us for it.”
“I buckled her in myself. I always did. I heard it click, Kayla. I know I heard it click.”
Her voice cracked on the word click, and she pressed the red button again, lightly, and let it go.
“After, when they let me see the car, the buckle was open. Just open. Lying there on the seat like somebody had pushed the button. The trooper said maybe it broke. Dale said it broke. They had a recall on some of those, a year or so later. Dale cut it out of the paper and showed me.”
“But I’ve never known,” she said. “Forty-two years, and I’ve never known if it broke or if I didn’t do it right. If I was in a hurry. If I was thinking about dinner.”
She finally looked up at me. Her eyes were wet, but her face was perfectly still, the way I think it had learned to be.
“So I hold him,” she said. “When I hold him, I know I’ve got him. My arms don’t come open. A buckle can’t hold on to anybody. That’s what I’ve told myself every day since Easter.”
I want to say I said something wise. I didn’t. I got down on my knees on her driveway, right there in my smock, and I put my arms around her, sitting in the back of her Buick, and I held on.
She was stiff at first. Darlene is not a hugger. And then she wasn’t stiff anymore, and she put her face against my shoulder and cried in a way I don’t think she had let herself cry in a very long time.
I cried too. I couldn’t help it. I thought about a twenty-two-year-old girl on an icy county road in Minnesota, looking at an open buckle. I thought about her carrying that for forty-two years and never once saying it out loud.
“Why didn’t you ever tell Ryan?” I said, when I could talk.
“We moved here the next year, for Dale’s job at the elevator. Nobody here knew. Dale thought it was better to start clean. Then Michelle came, and then Ryan, and every year it got harder to bring up.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “You don’t just say it over pot roast. ‘Pass the potatoes, and by the way.'”
“She’s buried in Marshall,” she added. “Next to Dale’s folks. I drive over every January. Ryan thinks I go to see an old friend from school.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. So I didn’t say anything. I just kept my arm around her.