The Cap My Father Never Saw

The years in between

I worked the pharmacy counter at the Rite Aid for thirteen years. In 2006 I took a job as a library aide at an elementary school out on the county road, which paid less and had better hours, and I stayed there nineteen years. I met Wayne Hale at a church fish fry in the fall of 1995, and we were married the next spring in the fellowship hall of my family’s church, with a ham.

Chase was born in 1999. Macy was born in 2002. After that, there was no time for anything.

Every few years I tried. I signed up for English composition at the community college in 2004, got an A on the first paper, and dropped it in week nine because Chase had pneumonia. I signed up again in 2008 for a biology class and dropped that too. Each time I put the registration slip in the same sock drawer, on top of the Rotary letter, and told myself I would get back to it when things were calmer.

Things were never calmer.

In January of 2011 I enrolled in a Tuesday night history class. I paid the fee and bought the book. And on the second Sunday in March, my father came home from church, sat down in his chair in front of the ballgame, and died.

He was sixty-three. His heart just stopped, with a glass of tea on the arm of the chair. My mother found him at the commercial. She sat with him for twenty minutes before she called anyone, and she told me later she wanted that time. She had never gotten to sit with him in the daytime before.

I did not go back to school for ten more years.

What my mother kept cleaning

Mama kept cleaning houses until she was seventy-three.

Mama never sat down, even then. Mrs. Pruitt told me so at the funeral. She said, “I begged that woman to sit with me, Denise. In thirty-one years I never once got her in a chair.”

Mama’s back gave out in 2019. She moved to a small ground-floor apartment ten minutes from us, with a recliner and a window and three geraniums in coffee cans on the patio. I went on Thursdays after work to take her to the grocery store and the doctor. Dale came on Sundays, in his gravel truck, and ate whatever she’d made and never said much.

I want to tell you about my brother, so you can understand him when he comes back into this. Dale Tackett is fifty-four years old and six foot two, with a neck like a fence post and hands that have been broken so many times they healed in directions hands were not meant to go. He is the kind of man who does not use the word feelings in a sentence unless it is “I don’t have any.”

He did not cry at Daddy’s funeral. He stood at the grave in his one jacket with his jaw set and shook hands with every person who came and said “Thank you for coming” in a voice like a gate hinge.

He did not cry at Mama’s, either. I would have bet money nothing on this earth could make him.