The Cap My Father Never Saw

The can

In April of 2021, on a Thursday, I was in Mama’s apartment helping her sort a drawer of old bills when she told me to go get the can.

“What can?”

“Your daddy’s can. On the kitchen table. Dale brought it Sunday.”

I did not know what she was talking about, and then I did. It was the red Folgers can from the garage shelf. When Mama moved out, Dale had cleaned out the house off Old Mayfield Road to get it ready to sell, and found the can behind the Christmas lights. He had not opened it. He kept it on the floor mat of his truck for three weeks, until Mama told him to bring it to her.

She had me carry it to her recliner. She put it in her lap and she held it there with both hands for a while, like something warm.

“He started it the winter you turned fourteen,” she said. “A dollar here, a dollar there. He never took one penny out. Not the winter of the layoff. Not when the transmission went in the truck. Not when we were four months behind on the light bill. I wanted to, one winter, and he took the can and put it on the top shelf where I couldn’t reach.”

She took the lid off.

There was cash inside, folded and rolled and tied in rubber bands, and a lot of coins in the bottom. There was a little brown bank envelope too, with a note in my father’s handwriting. I could read it over her shoulder.

For Dee. When she’s ready.

He had written it, we figured out later, in the spring of 1993, on the back of a barge yard pay stub.

We counted it on her kitchen table that afternoon, with Mama sorting the coins into stacks. It came to one thousand, eight hundred and forty dollars and sixty-three cents.

It was not a fortune. It would not have paid for one year of Murray in 1993. But it was thirty-two years of a man putting something in a can that he could not afford to put there, for a child who had told him she did not want what the can was for.

I cried for a long time. Mama did not. She watched me with her hands folded.

“I’m seventy-six,” she said at last. “Your daddy’s gone ten years. I’m not going to see a lot more. But I’d like to see you use that can.”

“Mama, I’m forty-six years old.”

“I know how old you are. I was there.”

“You’re not too old to sit in a chair, Denise,” she said. “I sat in one for thirty years’ worth of other people’s. Somebody ought to sit in one for us.”

I did not understand that sentence until the very end, and when I did, I was standing in a tent in front of three hundred people.