“Where are you going?” Paula asked.
“We’re outta here,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Keisha asked, outraged. “Where are you going? Lady, if this show isn’t going to pay to hear what I know, maybe you should.”
Cynthia said, “I’m not going to be made a fool of anymore.”
“A thousand dollars,” Keisha said. “I’ll tell you what your momma told me to tell you for a thousand dollars.”
Cynthia was rounding the couch. I reached out my hand for hers.
“Okay, seven hundred!” Keisha said as we went to find our way to the green room.
“You really are a piece of work,” Paula told Keisha. “You could have been on TV. All the free advertising in the world, but you’ve got to shake us down for a few hundred bucks.”
Keisha gave Paula the evil eye, looked at her hair. “That’s one bad dye job, bitch.”
“You were right,” Cynthia said on the drive home.
I shook my head. “You were good, walking away like that. You should have seen the look on that so-called psychic’s face when you took off your mike. It’s like she was watching her meal ticket walk away.”
Cynthia’s smile was caught in the glare of some oncoming headlights. Grace, after a flurry of questions we declined to answer, had fallen asleep in the backseat.
“What a waste of an evening,” Cynthia said.
“No,” I said. “What you said was right, and I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about this. Even if there’s only a one-in-a-million chance, you have to check it out. So we checked it out. And now we can cross it off and move on.”
We pulled into the drive. I opened the back door, unbuckled Grace, and carried her into the house, following Cynthia into the living room. She walked ahead of me, turned on the lights in the kitchen as I headed for the stairs to carry Grace up to bed.
“Terry,” Cynthia said.
Ordinarily, I might have said “Be there in a sec” and taken Grace upstairs first, but there was something in my wife’s voice that said I should come into the kitchen immediately.
So I did.
Sitting in the center of the kitchen table was a man’s black hat. An old, worn, shiny-with-wear fedora.
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Gently, I set Grace down on the couch in the living room, tucked a throw pillow under her head, and went back into the kitchen.
The fedora might as well have been a dead rat, the way Cynthia was staring at it. She was standing as far away from the table as possible, her back to the wall, and her eyes were full of fear.
It wasn’t the hat itself that scared me. It was how it got there. “You watch Grace for a minute,” I said.
“Be careful,” Cynthia said.
I went upstairs, flicked on the lights in each room and poked in my head as I did so. Checked the bathroom, then decided to check the other rooms again, looking in closets, under beds. Everything looked the way it should.
I came back down to the main floor, opened the door to our unfinished basement. At the bottom of the steps I waved my hand around, caught the string, and turned on the bare bulb.
“What do you see?” Cynthia called from upstairs.
I saw a washer and dryer, a workbench piled with junk, an assortment of nearly empty paint cans, a folded-up spare bed. Nothing much else.
I came back upstairs. “The house is empty,” I said.
Cynthia was still staring at the hat. “He was here,” she said.
“Who was here?”
“My father. He was here.”
“Cynthia, someone was here and left that on the table, but your father?”
“It’s his hat,” she said, more calmly than I might have expected. I approached the table, reached out to grab it. “Don’t touch it!” she said.
“It’s not going to bite me,” I said, and grabbed one of the peaks between my thumb and forefinger, then grabbed it with both hands, turning it over, looking inside.
It was an old hat, no question. The edges of the brim were worn, the lining darkened from years of sweat, the nap worn to the point of shiny in places.
“It’s just a hat,” I said.
“Look inside,” she said. “My father, years ago, he lost a couple of hats, people took his by mistake at restaurants, one time he took somebody else’s, so he got a marker and he put a ‘C,’ the letter, he wrote it on the inside of the band. For ‘Clayton.’”
I ran my finger along the inside of the band, folding it back. I found it on the right side, near the back. I turned the hat around so that Cynthia could see.
She took a breath. “Oh my God.” She took three tentative steps toward me, reached her hand out. I extended the hat toward her, and she took it, holding it as though it was something from King Tut’s tomb. She held it reverently in her hands for a moment, then slowly moved it toward her face. For a moment, I thought she was going to put it on, but instead, she brought it to her nose, took in its fragrance.
“It’s him,” she said.
I wasn’t going to argue. I knew that the sense of smell was perhaps the strongest when it came to triggering memories. I could recall going back to my own childhood home once in adulthood-the one my parents moved from when I was four-and asking the current owners if they’d mind my looking around. They were most obliging, and while the layout of the house, the creak of the fourth step as I climbed to the second floor, the view of the backyard from the kitchen window, were all familiar, it was when I stuck my nose into a crawl space, and caught a whiff of cedar mixed with dampness, that I felt almost dizzy. A flood of memories broke through the dam at that moment.
So I had an idea of what Cynthia was sensing as she held the hat so close to her face. She could smell her father.
She just knew.
“He was here,” she said. “He was right here, in this kitchen, in our house. Why, Terry? Why would he come here? Why would he do this? Why would he leave his goddamn hat but not wait for me to come home?”
