Counting Out the Rest at Dad’s Table

The Hat

Dad’s birthday is the fourteenth of June. He turned seventy-three this year.

Jasper had not spent a dime of what he made. Every Saturday, the forty went into the coffee can on his dresser, and every Saturday night he counted it on his bed with the door open.

The Thursday before Dad’s birthday, Jasper came out to the garage where I was changing the oil in Andrea’s car. He stood there a minute without saying anything.

“Dad, can you take me to the farm store?”

“What for?”

“Grandpa’s hat has a hole in it,” he said. “Right in the top. He’s had it as long as I’ve been alive.”

I set the oil pan down. “You want to buy him a hat?”

“With the first thirty,” Jasper said. “The thirty you gave me. Not Grandpa’s ten. Your thirty.”

I did not trust my voice for a minute, so I wiped my hands on a rag longer than I needed to.

“Why my thirty, bud?”

He shrugged the way twelve-year-old boys shrug, with his whole body. “I don’t know. It felt like it should go back to the family.”

We drove to the farm store in Cynthiana that evening. They had a wall of straw hats near the boots, and Jasper tried on about every one of them himself, because he said Grandpa’s head was about as big as his.

He picked a plain cattleman’s straw with a brown band. It was twenty-eight dollars and some change with tax. He paid for it himself, counting the bills out to the girl at the register one at a time.

“Twenty,” he said under his breath. “Thirty.”

She gave him his change and he put the coins in his pocket. I had to walk out to the truck ahead of him.

The Birthday

We had Dad’s birthday supper on Sunday evening out at the farm. Trina brought a pan of fried chicken and the boys. Andrea brought a jam cake, because that is what Dad’s mother always made him.

We ate on the back porch where it was a little cooler. The locusts were going in the trees and there were lightning bugs coming up out of the hayfield by the time we got to the cake.

Then Jasper went out to the truck and came back with the hat. He had wrapped it himself in the Sunday funnies, and it looked exactly like a twelve-year-old had wrapped a hat in the funnies.

“Happy birthday, Grandpa.”

Dad tore the paper off slow. He sat there holding that hat in both hands and turning it around. He did not say anything for a long time.

“Your old one has a hole in it,” Jasper said. “Right in the top. I figured the sun was getting through.”

Dad cleared his throat. “Where’d you get the money for this, son?”

Jasper did not look at me. I will always love him for that. He did not look at me once.

“I worked for it,” he said. “Mowing.”

Dad’s chin moved. He set the old hat down on the table, the one with the hole in it, and he put the new one on, and he pulled the brim down low over his eyes. He kept it there.

Nobody said anything. Andrea put her hand on my knee under the table. Trina got up and went in the house to get more ice nobody needed.

After a while Dad reached over and put his big, spotted hand on the back of Jasper’s neck, the way he used to do with me when I was small, and he left it there.

“Thank you, son,” he said. That was all he said. It was enough.

He wore that hat every single day after that. To the barn, to the post office, to the feed store, to the sale. I never saw the old one again.