The Cap My Father Never Saw

I learned to be quiet in the daytime. I learned to make my own lunches and iron my own blouses and tiptoe past the room where my father slept. I thought every kid lived like that, in a house where somebody was always either leaving or coming home tired.

There is one thing about my mother I have to explain, because everything else rests on it.

Mama never sat down in a house she cleaned.

Not once, in all the years. I know because I asked her, when I was about twelve and had started going along on school holidays to carry the bucket. She ate her lunch standing up at the counter in Mrs. Pruitt’s kitchen, a bologna sandwich in wax paper, with her back to a perfectly good chair.

“Why don’t you sit, Mama?”

She looked at the chair as if I had asked her to climb on the table.

“It’s not my chair, Denise.”

“Mrs. Pruitt wouldn’t care.”

“I’d care.”

She finished the sandwich in four minutes, standing, and went back to the baseboards. Nobody had told her she couldn’t sit. Mrs. Pruitt was a kind woman who left a plate of lemon cookies under plastic wrap every Wednesday. It was something Mama had decided about herself. A woman who is there to work does not sit in the chairs.

My father’s version of the same thing was that he never complained about his hours. Not one time. When I was small I asked him why he worked when it was dark, and he said, “Somebody’s got to do the part nobody sees, Dee, and I’m good at it.” Then he tickled my ribs and went to bed.

The can on the garage shelf

On a high shelf in our garage, between a gallon of antifreeze and a box of Christmas lights, there was a red Folgers coffee can with a plastic lid.

I never once wondered about it, the way you never wonder about anything in the garage. The lid was black with grease. On the side, in my father’s square block letters, written with a carpenter’s pencil and gone gray over the years, were four words. Dee’s school. Started 1989.

I was forty-six years old before anyone told me what was in the can, and the person who told me was my mother. First I have to tell you about 1993, the spring I decided I wasn’t the kind of person who went to college. I was wrong, and it took me thirty-three years to find out.