Nine Straw Hats at the First Port

But some of it was.

That night, Vicky came to dinner. She came wearing the hat, right into the dining room, which you are not really supposed to do, and nobody said a word about it.

She went first to Mom and kissed her on the cheek. Then she stood at the end of our big table, in front of all twelve of us, and she said it out loud.

“I owe y’all an apology,” she said. “I threw away something that was Dexter’s, and it was Sonya’s, and it was all of yours. I’d give anything to have it back. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Nobody said anything. Then Aunt Peg, who is seventy-five and has never in her life let a silence sit, said, “Well, sit down, Vicky, the bread’s getting cold.”

And Vicky sat down.

That was the apology. But that was not the whole price, and I do not want you to think she got off easy.

The next day was the private beach. Vicky did not lie on a lounge chair. She spent the whole morning walking the tide line with Olivia, looking for shells to glue on a frame for a picture of Daddy. It was Olivia’s idea.

And when we got home to Georgia, Vicky did something nobody asked her to do.

She called the Ford place in Waycross where Daddy worked forty years. She asked if anybody there had a picture of him in that hat.

It turned out somebody did. A man named Dirk, who had worked the bay next to Daddy since 1981, had a snapshot from a company picnic in 1994. Daddy in his work shirt. Mom beside him in the hat, coral ribbon and all.

Vicky drove over to his house on a Saturday and picked it up herself. She had it blown up and framed at the drugstore in Blackshear. It cost her more than the hats did.

She brought it to Mom’s house on Daddy’s birthday, in October. She did not wrap it. She just handed it to Mom on the front porch and stood there.

Mom looked at it for a long time.

“That’s the one,” she said. “That’s the hat.”

It hangs in Mom’s front hall now, right by the door, where you see it every time you leave.

I will tell you the other thing too, because it matters.

Cyrus did not let it go quickly. My brother is a fair man, and he loves his wife, but he was ashamed of her, and he told her so. For a while things were quiet at their house. Olivia told Rae it was the quietest Christmas they ever had.

Vicky went and talked to the preacher at her church. Then she went and talked to a counselor in Waycross, which nobody in our family has ever done in their life. She did it every other Tuesday for most of a year.