The Cap My Father Never Saw

The Saturday

I got to the campus at a quarter past eight. The ceremony for the Paducah graduates is small, forty-one of us that spring, and they hold it outdoors, in the courtyard behind the main building, under a big white tent with the sides rolled up. The maintenance crew sets out three hundred white folding chairs. The tent faces the river, and the wind comes across the floodwall off the Ohio and lifts the corners of the programs.

The ceremony was set for eleven o’clock, and it was already seventy-eight degrees. A good May morning. Blue sky. Mama would have called it a good line-drying day.

Wayne had been there since six. I found him in the second row from the front, on the aisle, in his church suit, with his lawn chair folded at his feet and a coffee cup in each hand, one of them for me.

Beside him were Chase, who is twenty-six and drives for the same lumber yard his father did, and Chase’s wife, Lacey, and Macy, who had driven in at seven with a bouquet of grocery-store roses. Macy was holding up her phone to film me before I had even sat down, and Wayne was waving a hand at her to stop.

In the front row, on the aisle, two chairs sat side by side.

On each one, propped against the seat back, was an index card folded to stand up. I had written them at the kitchen table the night before with a blue felt pen, in my best handwriting, and rewritten each of them three times.

Reserved for Hollis Tackett.

Reserved for Ruby Tackett.

I had not told Wayne to put cards out. I had only said two chairs. He had found them in my kitchen drawer that morning and carried them the whole way and put them on the chairs himself, and he had, I saw now, spent about twenty minutes straightening them. He had put my father’s on the left and my mother’s on the right, the order they had sat in at my high school graduation, thirty-three years before.

I put my hand on the back of Mama’s chair and then on Daddy’s. They were plain folding chairs, white metal frame, gray plastic seat, a dent in the corner of one from somebody stacking it badly.

“I put programs on them too,” Wayne said. “In case anybody thinks they’re free.”

That was as long a speech as Wayne makes. I squeezed his arm.

Dale arrived at ten to ten.

He came walking in from the parking lot in the one jacket he owns, a brown corduroy sport coat he bought for Daddy’s funeral, clean jeans and his good boots, with his wife Sue beside him in a yellow blouse. He walked down the center aisle looking straight ahead, like a man walking into a courtroom, and when he got to the front row, he stopped.

He looked at the two cards.

He looked at them for a long time. Then he looked at me, standing in my gown at the end of the row with my cap in my hands. His face did not do anything, really. It just stopped working for about two seconds, as if somebody had pulled the plug.

Then he cleared his throat and sat down in the chair next to Mama’s, with his ball cap on his knee and his hands on top of it, and looked straight ahead at the stage.

“Dee,” he said, without turning.

“Yes?”

“Your hair’s crooked.”

“It’s the cap. It isn’t on yet.”

“Well, fix it.”

That was all. It was perfectly like him.