Nine Straw Hats at the First Port

She told me about it once, at a fish fry. On the tailgate again.

“I’ve been mad at my mama for forty-three years,” she said. “And I took it out on yours. That’s the plain truth of it.”

“I know,” I said.

“I don’t know how you knew,” she said. “I don’t know how you knew to give me the first one.”

I thought about it.

“Daddy,” I said. “Daddy would have known. He always knew who needed the boots.”

She did not know about the boots. So I told her. And she cried on the tailgate, and I cried, and Cyrus came over with two more paper plates of catfish and said, “What in the world is wrong with y’all now,” and we both laughed until we could not breathe.

The hats are all over Ware County now. Aunt Peg wears hers to the garden club. Jackie wears hers to watch Blair play softball. Rae took hers to college in Statesboro and wears it to the football games.

Tamara wears hers to church. Olivia wears hers to work at the Dairy Queen, until her manager made her stop, and now she keeps it in her car.

Mom wears hers every Sunday.

It is not the same hat. It never will be. It does not have a little split in the brim, and Daddy did not haggle for it, and the ribbon is too bright.

But every Sunday morning, before church, Mom calls Vicky on the phone.

And every Sunday morning, Vicky drives the thirty minutes over from her house, and comes up on the porch, and ties Mom’s ribbon for her.

She ties it straight. Mom says she ties it straighter than Daddy ever did.

Mom never fixes it.

I asked her about that once. Why she lets Vicky do it, when she could tie her own ribbon with her eyes closed after fifty years.

Mom just smiled at me.

“Because she needs to do it more than I need it done,” she said. “And because your daddy would have liked it.”

I think he would have. I think he would have stood there on that porch in his work shirt, with his hands in his pockets, and watched the two of them, and not said one word.

He never did need to say much. He just handed you what you needed.

I am trying to learn to be like him. Some days I do all right.

The last hat in Miss Viola’s stack was mine. I almost did not keep one for myself. Rae made me.

I wear it on the porch in the evenings, when the heat breaks and the whippoorwills start up out past the pasture. I tie the ribbon myself.

I tie it a little crooked. On purpose.