“Mr. Elvin let me. He said I did it right. He said I checked it twice like a real lineman.” He was talking so fast he was running out of breath. “And Miss Netta said her husband gets to sleep in his own bed because of Mama. Because of the lights.”
“Well,” Roberta said. “My goodness.”
Gavin stopped. He took off the hard hat, finally, and held it in both hands in front of him. He looked down at it.
“Mamaw,” he said. “Papaw did that too, didn’t he? He turned on people’s lights. For people like Miss Netta.”
Roberta did not say anything for a long moment. I stood at the bottom of the steps with my hand on the rail.
“Yes,” she said. “He did.”
“Then you shouldn’t be mad at him,” Gavin said. “And you shouldn’t be mad at Mama. She was helping people. That’s not caring about strangers more. That’s just her job.”
He said it the way children say true things, plain, without any idea how heavy they are.
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Roberta put her hand over her mouth.
I have known Roberta Smoot for sixteen years. I had never seen her cry. Not at her husband’s funeral, not when her son and I split up, not ever.
She cried then. Not loud. She just sat in her rocker with her hand over her mouth and the tears running down, and she looked at that boy holding my hard hat.
Gavin got scared. He looked at me. “Did I say something bad?”
“No, baby,” Roberta said, and she reached for him. “No. You said something right. Mamaw’s the one who said something bad.”
She pulled him into her lap, all ten years and long legs of him, and held on.
“I told you a wrong thing about your mama,” she said into the top of his head. “I was mad at something that happened a long time ago, and I took it out on her. That wasn’t fair to her and it wasn’t fair to you. I’m sorry.”
Then she looked up at me over his head.
“I’m sorry, Josie,” she said. “I had no business.”
I came up the steps. I did not know what to say, so I didn’t say anything for a minute. I just sat down on the top step by her rocker, in the last of the sun.
“Elvin told me about the ice storm,” I said finally. “Four days in front of the woodstove.”
“Five,” Roberta said. “It was five. He always told it as four.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand and almost laughed. “That man.”
“Gavin said you’ve got his hard hat in your closet.”
She nodded. “Yellow. All his stickers on it. Every co-op he ever helped, he got a sticker.” She was quiet a minute. “I used to hate that hat. It meant he was leaving.”
Gavin twisted around in her lap. “Can I see it?”
Roberta looked at him for a long time. “Yes,” she said. “I believe you can.”
She went in and got it. It was an old yellow hard hat, the kind with the full brim they don’t make anymore, so covered with stickers you could barely see the shell. Utilities from Mississippi and Missouri and Georgia and places I had never heard of.
Gavin held it in his lap like it was made of gold. He held his grandfather’s hat in one hand and my spare in the other, and he looked from one to the other.