Nine Straw Hats at the First Port

Miss Viola took her glasses off and looked at all of us standing behind me. She counted us with one long finger. Then she laughed out loud.

“Twenty each, if you take all nine,” she said. “And you want ribbon, I got ribbon.”

She pulled out a cigar box full of spools. Red, white, navy, green, yellow, and, near the bottom, a spool of coral grosgrain.

I held it up. Mom saw it and put her hand over her mouth.

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s the color.”

“Nine hats with the coral,” I said to Miss Viola. “But don’t tie the ribbons on. Just cut me nine lengths and I’ll tie them myself.”

“Long enough for a bow?” she said.

“Long enough for a bow,” I said.

I counted heads on my fingers while she worked. Mom. Aunt Peg. Cousin Jackie and Blair. Denny’s wife, Tamara. Rae. Olivia. Me.

Rae was counting too. She is smart, my girl. She is studying to be a nurse.

“That’s eight, Mom,” she said.

“Nine,” I said.

She looked at me. She knew right away. She stepped up close so nobody else could hear.

“After what she did?” she said. “Mom. She threw Grandpa’s hat in the river.”

“I know what she did,” I said. “I was there.”

“Then why?”

I did not answer her. I did not know yet how to say it without it coming out wrong.

Mom was standing right there. She had heard all of it. She did not say a thing. She just reached into the stack and picked up the top hat and turned it in her hands, the way Vicky had turned the old one.

“Leslie,” she said. “Which one is hers?”

“The first one,” I said. “She gets the first one.”

Mom looked at me for a long minute over the brim. Then she nodded, once, and set the hat back on top of the stack.

Olivia was standing behind her grandmother. She had heard too. She did not say anything, but she put her face down in her hands, and Aunt Peg put an arm around her.

I paid Miss Viola one hundred and eighty dollars in cash. I gave her a twenty on top for the ribbon. She tried to give the twenty back, and I would not take it.

“Your daddy’s girl,” Miss Viola said, and folded the bill into her pocket.

I had not told her one thing about my daddy.

We spent the rest of the morning on the pier and up along Bay Street. Mom bought Olivia a little straw purse with a seashell on it. Aunt Peg bought six bottles of hot sauce for her Sunday school class.

The men came back from snorkeling sunburned and happy, and Denny told everybody about a sea turtle the size of a tractor tire.

Cyrus came last. He walked up to me and looked at the stack of hats I was carrying under my arm.