Safety Seat

Safety seat                    

My fiancé had already bought all the bottles, formula, and diapers we’d need to survive a third world war, and although it probably cost us a second mortgage, at least we were set for a while. If only I could find something that might restrain my boy from throwing his own feces, or picking tiny creatures from my hair and devouring them with the gusto of a sailor’s vulgarity, then it would be a mission accomplished for me. Sadly, I don’t think this baby store sells strait jackets.

I flipped opened up my phone to tell my fiancé to bring the car around so I wouldn’t have to run through the rain. After a quick hormonal rant about the baby shower, she explained how she needed to buy something from somewhere and mentioned that she loved me. I wasn’t listening. I was busy trying not to drop the baby seat, which was gradually sliding out of my grasp. I told her that I’d see her later, and juggled the phone around in my hands before finally stuffing it into my pocket.

“Ryan?” I stopped. Is someone calling my name? In a department store for babies? With the kind of people I hang out with on a daily basis that just doesn’t seem possible.

She’s always had fair skin, but the pigment that painted her expression wasn’t fair. It was pallid, drained and shocked with eyebrows crunched together, as if she was going to object to something—but didn’t. Her blonde hair was curt, sheared close to her ears, and square against her neck. I wish she had her hair cut like this when I was dating her.

Maybe seeing her at a bar one day and catching up would have been a good day. Even waking in an inescapable James Bond moment with her would have been better than meeting her when I was buying things for my baby—and she was buying things for hers.

“Marlow?” I was younger back then, and didn’t know the phrase “Settle for” let alone “Settle down.” She didn’t make it any easier, she pressed and pressed until I was two dimensional with the idea of marriage. Our last conversation was her crying when I told her my final answer. I wasn’t going to marry her.

She never responded when I called her name, and the wall created between us from the silence was growing more palpable with every hushed second. The gears of our eyes were jammed together and we weren’t standing in the pacifier/baby wipe section of Babies R Us, we were back in High School, holding each other under the stone steps on the west wing of the school. We were back to our first kiss leaning against the limbs of the tree in her front yard. I’d gained the baggage of a soon-to-be baby boy, and a demanding fiancé. I was ensnared in the cage of engagement.                 

I hung around the store. Waiting for my wife, waiting for her. I touched every item on the shelf as I gadded by them in the aisles. I sat on the lowest shelf in the first aisle, listening to the ebb and flow of battles between parents and children.

I sat on the safety seat box outside in the rain, and watched her drive away. She was a friend from the past, a stranger from the present.