The Cap My Father Never Saw
My real diploma came in the mail six weeks later, in a cardboard tube with a rubber band around it. The one they hand you on the stage is only a burgundy folder with nothing in it, which nobody tells you until you are holding it.
I hung the real one in the hall outside our bathroom, between a picture of Chase in his Little League uniform and a picture of Macy missing her two front teeth.
But this is about the Saturday in May before the tube came, when I was fifty years old and had been awake since ten minutes to five, standing in my kitchen in Paducah, Kentucky, in my slip and my good house shoes, trying to remember how my mother used to say you steam wrinkles out of black polyester.
She said to hang it in the bathroom, run the shower hot, and close the door. So at five in the morning on the biggest day of my life I stood in a steamy bathroom talking to her a little, out loud, because nobody was up to hear.
“It’s polyester, Mama. It’s the cheap kind.”
She would have said the cheap kind needs it most.
Wayne had already gone. He left the house at ten after five with a thermos and a lawn chair he did not need, because I had told him the night before that the chairs at the ceremony were first come, first served, and that I wanted two of them in the front row on the aisle.
“Which two?” he asked.
“Just the two on the end.”
He did not ask who they were for. He has been married to me for thirty years, and he knows when I have already answered a question.
The house with two shifts
I grew up in a small brick house off Old Mayfield Road, on the county side of Paducah, in a kitchen that never had a quiet hour.
My father, Hollis Tackett, worked the night crew at a barge yard on the Ohio River for twenty-six years. He chipped rust and scraped old paint off steel hulls in the dark, with a respirator and a headlamp, and then he painted them, and then in the morning he came home smelling like paint thinner and river water and cold iron.
My mother, Ruby, cleaned houses. She had eleven of them a week by the time I was in high school, most in the nice neighborhoods near Wallace Park. Dr. Ashby’s wife on Mondays. The Fosters on Tuesdays. Mrs. Verna Pruitt on Wednesdays and Fridays, because Mrs. Pruitt believed a house should be cleaned twice a week even if nobody had been in it.
Between the two of them, our house ran on shifts. Mama left at seven in the morning with her bucket, her rubber gloves, and her own vacuum cleaner in the trunk, because she did not trust anybody else’s. Daddy came in at a quarter to eight, as she was backing out of the driveway, and they would pass each other in the carport and say something, one sentence, two at the most.
“There’s biscuits.”
“I saw.”
That was most of what I knew about how two people love each other, growing up. A pan of biscuits on the stove at a quarter to eight in the morning, and a man who ate three of them standing up before he went to bed with a towel over the window.