Nine Straw Hats at the First Port

I have known my brother all my life. I have seen him mad maybe four times. He does not yell. He gets very still, and his ears go red.

His ears went red.

He looked at Vicky. She had both hands up, palms out, like she was saying it was nothing.

“Cyrus, it was a joke,” she said. “It was falling apart. I was going to buy her a new one in Nassau.”

He did not say anything to her there in front of everybody. He walked over and took her by the elbow, gently, and walked her down to the far end of the deck by the railing.

I could not hear him over the wind. I could only see them. He talked for a long time. She kept shaking her head, and then she stopped shaking it.

When he came back, he came alone.

He knelt down beside Mom’s chair. He is a big man, a lineman for the electric co-op, and it took him a minute to get down there.

“Mama, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have been standing right there.”

“You were getting the baby a Coke,” Mom said. “You can’t be everywhere.”

“She’ll make it right,” he said. “I don’t know how yet. But she will.”

Mom patted his hand. “Go on and see about Olivia,” she said. “She’s the one who’s upset.”

That is my mother. Her husband’s hat was at the bottom of a river, and she was worried about a sixteen-year-old.

Vicky did not come to the pool deck again that afternoon. She did not come to dinner. Cyrus sat at our big table with the rest of us and ate his prime rib without tasting it.

I want to tell you about Vicky, because I think if you only know the hat, you will not understand the rest.

Vicky married my brother twenty-two years ago. She is from Hazlehurst, about an hour up the road from us. She is two years older than me, and she has always been the loudest woman in any room.

She is funny. I will give her that. She can tell a story about a flat tire and have a whole table crying laughing. She is a good mother to Olivia. She works the front desk at the hospital in Waycross and knows everybody in two counties.

But she has a sharp side, and it comes out when she feels like she is on the outside of something.

Her mother left when she was four years old. Just left. Packed a car one Saturday and drove off and never came back. Vicky was raised by her daddy and his mother, in a single-wide on a dirt road outside Hazlehurst.

Her daddy did his best. He was a pulpwood cutter. He worked from dark to dark. Her grandmother was old and tired and not much for hugging.