Last night I pulled a box down from the top shelf of the hall closet, where I keep all my hats. Digging through all the soft wool, I found two of your old baseball hats and my heart lurched in my chest. I lifted them out and with it a smell - the smell of you. I could feel how wide my eyes were, in shock. The husband looked the same - he saw me holding them, saw how well-worn they were and knew immediately what they were.
I am not looking a gift hat in the mouth but neither hat is the green John Deere hat (which I think you actually threw out it became so grimy) but they were both definitely long-termers in your hat wardrobe. I think I was the source for both hats - I was always getting freebies because of my job. I saw you wearing these hats more often than I saw you not wearing these hats, especially the limited edition St. Louis Cardinals baseball hat. It is well-worn, with fingerprint marks on the brim where you adjusted it, the crown faded to a pinkish red, the sweat band discolored. I doubt it has ever been washed.
It feels holy, to hold that hat. Technically there is probably enough of your DNA on the hat for a scientist to grow you in a lab.1 I wonder if the trace smell of you might dissipate now that the hats are exposed to air. I suppose at some point I will wear the St. Louis Cardinals hat, probably when I am back home visiting, K and I still go to a game once in awhile. If I do K. will ask, Hey sissy is that the hat that belonged to C____? because of course I texted her, weeping, right after finding it and she was there as she has been for me every day and every step of the way of adjusting to a world without you in it. I will say yes, and everyone will be quiet the way they get when your name is mentioned, in sorrowful reverie. He was such a good man, your dad and I thought so highly of him my mom will whisper for the hundredth time and no one will mind.
Seeing it, smelling it was such a shock. I have been looking for the hats for months now, since I mailed off your high school letter jacket, along with my engagement ring, to your mom for her to give your kids when the right time comes. I volunteered to do it, and my husband helped me box it up nicely and I set out for a short walk to a place just a few blocks away that mails packages. Halfway there I began to cry and almost walked right past the place, but the owner happened to be standing in his doorway and saw me with my box.
Did you want to mail that, he asked me, and in a blur of tears I let him usher me inside, get the label filled out, and get the payment made. When we finished the transaction he said I hope you feel better and I smiled behind my mask and the upward motion of my cheeks squeezed out two big streams of tears that had collected in my eyes like a watershed. I broke down completely on the way home and even now I don’t know why - I was *glad* to offer those things to your mom, they *belong* with your kids. I have zero regrets that I did it and yet it was such a wrench, sending those things off.
When I got home that day I looked for the baseball hats - I had held onto them since 2008, when I noticed them still in the closet in the condo after we’d sold it. I kept them, meaning to give them to you when I saw you next, or mail them to you, but forgot where I stashed them and so forgot about them entirely. I was angry with myself for losing track of them. Over time I resigned myself to them being lost and I made myself feel better about it by remembering that I am still surrounded by some of the things that surrounded us in our time together: a picture we bought in Santa Fe now hangs in my living room. A chair that my dog stakes his claim on in the family room was a favorite of yours in our Houston living room. In my kitchen there is the very same rug you walked on, in another kitchen a long time ago.
All of these things have blended into the home I have made here with my husband; I see signs of our life together in every room. It is the opposite of painful, these reminders, they are as warm as the lamplight I sit in, the same woman in the same red chair that you once knew, writing into the dark late of night and thinking of you.
or, if you read Stephen King’s “They Always Come Back”, to summon a demon