I know all of that because Vicky told me, one night years ago, sitting on the tailgate of Cyrus’s truck at a fish fry. She had had two beers and she told me the whole thing, flat, like she was reading it off a list.
She never told me again. I do not think she remembers telling me at all.
But I remembered. I remembered it that night on the ship, lying awake in our cabin with Dallas snoring next to me.
I thought about every Mother’s Day. Vicky always found a reason to be at work, or to be sick, or to show up late and leave early.
I thought about every time Mom pulled out the old photo albums at Christmas. Vicky would get up and go stand on the porch and smoke, even after she quit smoking.
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I thought about the way she talked about that hat at the dock that morning. Mom had told the honeymoon story three times while we stood in line to board. Everybody had heard it. Vicky had rolled her eyes.
I did not think that made what she did all right. It did not. She threw my dead father’s gift to my mother into a river, in front of all of us.
But I started to think maybe I understood why that hat in particular had made her so mad.
It was a mother thing. It was a whole family of mothers and daughters standing around something she had never had and never would.
I got up about two in the morning and went out on our little balcony. The ship was way out in the dark by then. There were no lights anywhere but ours.
I stood out there in the warm wind and I thought about Daddy.
He was not a talker. He was a mechanic at the Ford place in Waycross for forty years. He fixed things. If you had a problem, he did not give you a speech. He handed you a wrench.
When I was twelve, a girl at school told everybody I smelled like a barn, because we kept a few cows and I did chores before the bus. I came home crying.
Daddy did not tell me to ignore her. He took me to the Western store that Saturday and bought me the best pair of boots in the place.
Then he said, “Now you go on and walk in there like you own it.”
I walked in like I owned it. The girl never said it again. I wore those boots until my feet outgrew them, and then Rae wore them.
That was what I was thinking about, out on that balcony at two in the morning. Not what Vicky deserved. What Daddy would have done.
Daddy would not have fussed. He would have gone and found the part.