The Car Seat in Her Buick

The girl at the Dairy Queen window held my cone out to me and then did not let go of it. I tugged once, politely, and she held on, and that was when I looked at her face.

Her name was Megan. She was seventeen, and she had run the evening shift at our Dairy Queen since spring. I filled her inhaler every month at the pharmacy, and she always paid in quarters and apologized for it.

“Kayla,” she said. “I have to tell you something, and I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

It was a Tuesday in July, a little after six. I had just finished a ten-hour shift behind the counter at the drugstore, and my feet hurt the way they always hurt by Tuesday.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Your mother-in-law came through the drive-through at four.” She glanced back at the fryer, then leaned out the window. “Jack was with her. He was on her lap. In the front seat. While she was driving.”

For a second the words did not make a picture. Then they did, all at once, and I could see it perfectly: my son on Darlene’s knees, his hands on the big steering wheel of her Buick, the two of them grinning.

“On her lap,” I said.

“He was holding the wheel. She was letting him honk.” Megan’s face went red. “I’m sorry. I almost called you. I didn’t know if I should. My mom said I should tell you if I saw you.”

I took the cone out of her hand, very gently, and set it in the cup holder. I never touched it again. It melted down the side of the cup and dried there, and I found it two days later.

“Thank you, Megan,” I said. “You did exactly right. Don’t you ever be sorry for that.”

Darlene lived four blocks from the Dairy Queen. I know it is only four blocks because I have walked them pushing a stroller more times than I can count, past the hardware store and the Legion and the bank with the clock that is always six minutes slow.

Four blocks of Main Street, with farm pickups backing out of angle parking without looking. Four blocks with the stop sign at Third that half the town treats like a suggestion.

Jack was two years and one month old. He weighed twenty-eight pounds at his checkup. I knew the number because I had written it on the calendar in the kitchen in purple pen.

I have worked in a pharmacy for eleven years. I am not a nurse and I would never pretend to be one, but I have read a great many pamphlets in the slow hours, and I know what a front airbag does.

It does not open gently. It opens faster than you can blink, hard enough to break a grown man’s nose, and it is built for a grown man’s chest, not a toddler held between a grandmother and a steering wheel.

I don’t remember driving to her house. I remember the turn signal ticking, and I remember thinking that I should not speed through town, and I remember doing it anyway.

I was in her driveway in three minutes.

Jack was in the side yard in nothing but his diaper, running through the sprinkler with his arms straight up in the air, shrieking the way he did when the cold water hit his belly.