The Back Seat

I named my daughter after my dead grandmother. It bothered people, because it hadn’t been so long since she died and it made people feel uncomfortable to say her name like that, so soon after she died.

This morning I picked up an old friend of hers who needed a ride to the store. Mrs. Solberg’s a proper lady, with a heavy European accent. She’s eighty years old and wears a corset. She dyes her hair platinum blond. From a distance, she looks like Marilyn Monroe, but up close you can tell she’s old.

Mrs. Solberg climbed into my car and looked at me with watery eyes before she turned to address my daughter, strapped into a child-seat in the back. She hesitated before she said, “Hello Augusta.”

I don’t think she knew she hesitated, but I could hear the silence smacking between her lips, along with all those old memories of petty quarrels and attempts at one-upmanship. I knew she hesitated because she was thinking about my grandmother and how she was dead.

Last year they drank coffee together and raised their eyebrows in unison. And that made her think of her own daughter who was also dead, but not yet commemorated by a wide-eyed three year old in the backseat of someone’s car.

I didn’t ask Mrs. Solberg to use the seatbelt, but she buckled herself in anyway before we left the driveway.