I am not a woman who freezes. When a farmer calls at six in the morning with a combine down in the middle of harvest, I find him the part. I find it in Tifton or Valdosta or I drive to Albany myself.
But I stood on that deck and I could not think of one single thing to fix.
You cannot turn a cruise ship around in the St. Johns River for a straw hat. I knew that. Later I asked at the guest desk anyway, and the young man there was kind about it, but he said what I already knew.
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And a shouting match at the rail would only have ruined Mom’s trip. That was the other thing I knew. This trip was not about Vicky. It was about Daddy.
My father died last spring. He was seventy-four. He had a heart attack in the yard while he was working on the riding mower, and he was gone before the ambulance got out to our road.
He and Mom had booked this cruise a year before that. Four nights out of Jacksonville, down to Nassau and back by way of a private beach. Their fiftieth anniversary was that summer.
He had it all planned. He was going to take her back to the same pier where he bought that hat. He was going to buy her another one, just to see the look on her face.
After the funeral Mom said she could not go. Then she said she could not stand to waste his money. Then she said she would go if we all went with her.
So twelve of us went in his place. Nine women and three men, all the way down from Waycross and Blackshear in four cars.
There was Mom, and her sister, Aunt Peg, who is seventy-five. There was Cousin Jackie and her daughter, Blair, who is twenty. There was my younger brother Denny and his wife, Tamara.
There was my husband, Dallas, and our daughter, Rae, who is nineteen and home from college. And there was my older brother Cyrus, and his wife, Vicky, and their girl, Olivia, who is sixteen.
That was the twelve. I had made the spreadsheet. I had booked the cabins and the dinner time and the shore day. I had printed everybody’s boarding passes and put them in plastic sleeves.
I had not planned for the hat.
Cyrus was on the other side of the pool when it happened. He had gone to get Olivia a soda. He came back across the deck and saw all our faces and saw Mom in the shade, and he said, “What.”
Nobody said anything for a second. Then Olivia said, very quietly, “Mom threw Grandma’s hat in the river.”