The Hat
David C. Metz
When he was six years old Bill wore a red cowboy hat everywhere except at the dinner table and to bed. He wore it on the Saturday a new family moved into the house that backed up to the empty lot next to his. He and his father were raking leaves in the front yard. His father paused, leaned on his rake and stared across the empty lot at the children scurrying around.
“Huh,” his father said.
Leaning on the child’s rake his father had fashioned for him by sawing half the handle off an older one, Bill said, “Huh,” drawing a smile from his father. A Black woman in a yellow dress stepped out onto the back stoop of the house and called to the children, who scrambled inside. Bill’s father resumed raking.
In the early afternoon, his father burned leaves in a large steel barrel in their back yard. Plumes of gray smoke billowed upward and a pungent odor hung in the air. Bill watched for a while, then wandered to the front yard. Across the empty lot, a boy was tossing a baseball into the air and catching it. He stopped when he saw Bill approach.
“Hi,” Bill said.
The boy nodded. “Hello.” He looked to be Bill’s age. He wore blue jeans with patches on the knees and black high-top sneakers.
“My name is Bill.”
“Ronny.”
“Are you going to live here now?”
Ronny nodded, eyeing Bill’s hat.
“I live over there,” Bill said, pointing back towards his house.
“Uh-huh. I seen you earlier.” Ronny tossed the baseball above his head, then stepped back and caught it.
“Do you play baseball?”
Ronny shook his head. “Do you?”
“Not yet. My dad says I can try out for Little League next summer if I want to.”
“Do you?”
Bill shrugged. Ronny tossed his baseball into the air again and caught it.
“Can I try?” Bill asked.
Ronny looked at him. “Can I see your hat?”
Bill thought for a moment. He had never let anyone touch his hat, not even his best friend Pete, who lived two doors down in the other direction. Of course, Pete had his own cowboy hat.
“I won’t do anything to it,” Ronny said. “I just want to try it on.”
Bill nodded and they made the exchange. Bill flipped the ball between his hands, then into the air, sending it higher each time, until he felt dizzy from craning his head back to track it.
Ronny stuck the hat on his head and tugged it down to his ears. He started to gallop around the yard, pretending to ride a horse. He smiled at Bill and called “Giddy-up,” pulling the hat off his head and slapping it against imaginary haunches. Bill smiled in return as he stumbled backwards tracking his highest toss yet. He caught the ball just before he hit the ground. Ronny asked if he was okay. Bill nodded and stood.
The woman in the yellow dress appeared on the back stoop and called to Ronny to come inside. She lingered a moment until she saw Ronny remove the cowboy hat and hand it to Bill.
Bill gave Ronny the baseball.
“I guess I’ll see you later,” he said.
“Okay.” Ronny turned and ran towards the house.
Bill walked back across the vacant lot and up the driveway to the back yard where his father was tending the barrel of burning leaves.
“It smells good,” Bill said.
His father nodded. “I know. Nothing like the smell of burning leaves. One of the best signs of fall.” With the rake and his free hand, he scooped a pile of leaves into the barrel, sending up fresh plumes of smoke. “Were you playing with Pete?”
Bill shook his head. “I was playing with the new boy, Ronny. His family is the one that moved in over there.” He pointed in the direction of Ronny’s house.
“Oh, yeah?” His father stood back from the barrel and looked at him. “What did you do?”
“He let me play with his baseball and I let him wear my hat.”
“He wore your hat?”
Bill nodded. “We traded.”
His father frowned.
“Is that okay?” Bill asked.
His father leaned over and placed his hands on Bill’s shoulders. “I don’t think you can keep the hat.”
“Why? Did I do something wrong?”
“No.”
“Then why are you taking my hat away?’
His father’s brow furrowed and he let out a sigh.
“We don’t know those people, Bill. We don’t know anything about them. It’s not a good idea to share your hat with someone you don’t know.” His father gently lifted the hat off Bill’s head and dropped it into the barrel. It smoldered but did not burn. Bill stuck his head over the barrel and stared at it, the rising heat warming his cheeks, smoke stinging his eyes. The feeling he had done something wrong gnawed at him. He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll buy you a new one,” his father said. “I promise.”
~ ~ ~
The summer after George Floyd’s murder, Bill and his wife, Nancy, watched the protest marches on television.
“I know it bothers you,” he said, “but we made the right decision.”
“Did we?”
“Yes. There are other ways to be involved. We can write letters. We can write checks.”
They had agreed to stay home because of Covid, but he could tell she harbored doubts.
“And besides,” he said, “Ellen is there. Doesn’t that count?”
Their daughter lived in the city and had called to say she and her boyfriend were joining the protest. Bill told her to be careful and to wear a mask. He scanned the crowd shots thinking he might see her. They watched the coverage until past eleven before they went to bed.
He had trouble falling asleep. He lay on his back, staring into the dark, listening to the hum of the central air, the occasional pop of an air duct, trying to let his mind drift towards slumber.
Instead, he thought of Ronny and the hat. The memory had stayed with him, although he hadn’t told the story to anyone except Nancy, when they were in college. They’d been sharing a pizza and drinking beer in a small, dimly-lit café two blocks from campus. He’d been talking about his childhood, describing to this Chicago girl what it was like to grow up downstate, in a town that was mostly white, and ended up telling her about the hat.
“Your dad just threw the hat into the fire?” she asked.
She’d introduced him to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Wretched of the Earth and talked about racism and the politics of poverty with an earnestness that made him feel shallow and uninformed. She sometimes sat in the student union with a group of Black students whom Bill found slightly intimidating, which in turn embarrassed him because it wasn’t as if anyone said or did anything to make him feel unwelcomed. Nancy, with her red hair, blue eyes and creamy white skin, seemed totally at ease. When they first met, he wondered if she had dated any of the guys in the group, but never asked. She always greeted him with a kiss and, as the group’s discussion rolled on, rising and falling in intensity, looped her arm through his and leaned closer, displays of affection that reassured him. He loved feeling her pressed against him, watching her face as she spoke. He hoped she could see that he cared about the issues, even if he wasn’t as vocal.
“Basically. I mean my mom said something about head lice. I don’t know.”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Nancy shrugged and took a sip of beer. “You want that?” She pointed to the lone piece of pizza on the tray in the center of the table.
“You think my dad’s a racist?”
“I didn’t say that…”
“Because he’s not. I’ve never heard him utter a racist word.”
“Okay.”
“I mean nobody’s perfect. You told me your dad voted for Reagan. Twice.”
“I said okay.”
They split the last piece of pizza and stepped out into the warm spring night. During the walk to his apartment, they were quiet.
Later, lying next to her in his narrow bed, the room lit by a single candle on his dresser, he said he hadn’t meant to be so defensive.
She rested her hand on his chest. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why did you tell me about the hat?”
He thought for a moment, watched the play of candlelight on her shoulder.
“I don’t know. I think about it sometimes.”
“Did you ever play with that boy again?”
“Not really.” In fact, he had never played with him again. Ronny was assigned to the other first grade class, which meant they only saw each other on the school bus, in the cafeteria during lunch and at recess. Bill didn’t speak to him past a mumbled “Hi.” The following spring, Bill’s family moved to a new development on the other side of town.
“That’s kind of sad in a way.”
“Why?”
“It seems like a lost opportunity. I mean it could have changed your life. Both of your lives.”
“Hmmm.”
She propped herself on an elbow, looking at him. “I’m serious. We meet people all the time and never know which ones are going to make a difference in our lives.”
He nodded. He didn’t want to tell her how he had avoided Ronny, or try to explain why. He wasn’t sure he could explain the combination of confusion and shame he’d felt towards Ronny after his father tossed the hat into the fire.
Now the air conditioning cut off leaving the house suddenly quiet. He could hear Nancy’s soft, measured breathing. She’d been quiet as they got ready for bed. Once under the covers, she’d read until Ellen texted to say she was safely home, then kissed him goodnight and turned off her reading lamp.
“Are you all right?” he’d asked.
“I’m just tired.”
“I thought maybe you were upset that we didn’t go on the march.”
She turned on her side to face him. “I’m upset because of all the craziness in the world right now. Everything is upside down and I feel pretty helpless.”
He placed a hand on her cheek. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” She kissed his hand. “But I really am tired.” She rolled onto her other side. In a moment he heard the sound of her breathing.
~ ~ ~
The next morning, he poured a mug of coffee and went to his home office to get on a senior staff call via Zoom. He watched his computer monitor populate with faces in squares like the opening of The Brady Bunch, except they were all middle-aged White men. There were nods, hellos, bland exchanges of work gossip as they waited for the meeting to start. Then someone mentioned the protest and a few heads started to shake. Bill tuned out the discussion and thought instead of Ellen, imagined her holding hands with Mark, her boyfriend, and marching in solidarity with the other protesters, believing in something bigger than herself. He heard his name and focused on the screen. Walt, the engineering manager, was smiling.
“I was wondering what you think, Bill, you’re the lawyer in the group.” Walt said. “Should we defund the police? Do all lives matter or just black ones?” Walt was a stocky, pugnacious man who liked to bait Bill, knowing he was the lone liberal on the staff. When he’d first learned that Bill was a Democrat, Walt had stared at him as if Bill had admitted to being a registered sex offender.
Now he said, “C’mon, Walt.”
Walt screwed his pudgy face into a smirk. “What?”
Bill shook his head.
The face of Jack Taylor, the Regional VP and General Manager, popped onto the screen. “Sorry I’m late, I had an early call with corporate that ran over. What’d I miss?”
“Not much,” Walt said, “Bill was just defending rioters.” He grinned to let everyone know it was a joke.
“Is that right, Bill?”
“You know me, Jack, I can’t resist rousing rabble.”
“Right,” Jack said. “But we love you anyway.” He flashed a smile that radiated warmth and good will. It was a smile, Bill thought, that was either completely genuine, or so well practiced that no one could tell the difference. Either way, Bill succumbed to it every time.
When Jack first joined the company, he’d invited a few members of his staff, including Bill, for a drink after work. Drinks led to dinner and near the end, after the waiter had cleared their plates and brought coffee, Bill and the others listened as their new boss recalled hearing a sports talk radio show one day when the topic was an NBA player who was the baby daddy to four different women.
“One of the callers, who was obviously a Black guy, he says, ‘Frank’—the host’s name was Frank—he says,” and here Jack slipped into a high-pitched imitation of a Black dialect, “‘Frank, the boy can’t help it. He Black, he Black.’” Jack laughed. Bill’s colleagues laughed. Bill smiled and looked at his hands folded on the table.
He’d told Nancy about it when he got home.
“I didn’t know if it was some kind of code or a test or something.”
“Test for what?” Nancy asked.
Bill shrugged. “Political leaning. How liberal you are.”
“Sounds to me like a white guy telling some other white guys a dumbass racist story. Did you say anything?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. How about ‘Not funny?’”
“C’mon, Nancy. I’ve got to work with this guy.”
“So?”
“So, lecturing him about racial sensitivity is not the best way to kick off our relationship.”
She shook her head.
“What?”
“I don’t think I could let something like that go.”
He’d always thought it was easier for her, a high school social studies teacher, to stake out liberal positions, than it was for him, a corporate lawyer.
“Well,” he said, “you don’t have to.”
“But you do?”
“I have to pick my battles,” he said.
Now he listened as Jack ran through the numbers—the monthly update against quarterly targets. The pandemic had knocked business off stride for the current quarter, but if things settled down, they could still hit the annual goal. At the end of the call, Jack asked each of them if they had anything to share with the team.
“Nope, I’m good,” Bill said, when it was Jack called on him.
~ ~ ~
At dinner that evening, he told Nancy about his exchange with Walt.
“Didn’t you tell me he voted for Trump?”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “To be honest, I think most of those guys did, but Walt was the only one who talked about it.”
“What an asshole.”
“He’s a good engineer, and he is not a bad guy to work with, he really isn’t. He’s actually great to work with. I don’t know.” Bill took a sip of wine.
“What?”
“I’m always surprised by guys like Walt. I shouldn’t be, but I am.”
“Did you tell him he was full of shit?”
“No, I decided not to take the bait.” He stared at his wine glass. “It’s not like I’m going to change their minds. And they’re not bad guys, really. Like Jack. First person in his family to go to college, worked his way through. It’s what drives him, the belief he’s worked hard for everything and doesn’t owe anyone. It’s the same for a lot of those guys and I kind of admire them in a way. But still…” He shook his head.
“They should know better?”
He nodded. He’d always valued getting along, avoiding confrontation. He’d never asked his father about the hat because he didn’t want to have the conversation he knew would follow, wasn’t sure what the point of such a conversation would be. So, he’d left it. His father was not perfect, but he was a good man, and that was enough. It was a judgment he hoped to earn from his own child. And from Nancy.
“I’m sorry if I disappoint you.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t put it on me.”
“I’m not.”
She shook her head. “You kind of are, Bill.”
He slumped in his chair, sifted his wine glass.
“I don’t mean to put it on you, but it matters to me what you think.”
“I think the world is crazy and we all have to do our best to make it less so.”
“About me.”
“Well,” she said, “I think you’re intelligent and kind and good looking…”
“C’mon, Nancy.”
She leaned closer and placed her hand on his. “I love you, you know that, right? I don’t think it’s me you have to worry about disappointing.”
~ ~ ~
The following Saturday, he and Nancy drove into the city to join a protest. They found a parking space in a garage and walked half a mile to the park where protesters were gathering. The crowd was large and growing: men, women, young, middle-aged, black, white, Asian, parents with children. Bill thought he might be the oldest white man there. Nancy held his hand as they maneuvered into the throng and found a space. After several minutes, they began to march.
They fell in step next to a Black couple. The man was tall and thin, with close-cropped hair gone gray at the temples and black horn rimmed glasses that gave him a professorial air. The woman was shorter, full-figured, with tightly braided hair that tumbled between her shoulders. When the man caught his eye, Bill nodded. He wasn’t sure what to say.
As the march proceeded out of the park onto a wide thoroughfare, he grew conscious of being swept into a sea of strangers drawn together for a single purpose. It struck him how isolated he was in his daily life, how removed he had been, even before the pandemic, from anything as real as this protest.
He thought about the hat, the way it smoldered on top of the burning leaves, the acrid smell. The way his father assumed that a new hat would fix everything. And in a way, it did. When his father came home from work that Monday, he presented the new hat to Bill. It was identical to the old one. Bill put it on immediately and wore it until bedtime. His mother even allowed him to wear it at dinner. (“Just this once,” she’d said.)
He wore it outside after school the next day. He was going to play with his friend Pete, but as he crossed the front yard he looked across the empty lot and saw Ronny in his yard playing catch with himself as he had been on Saturday. Ronny spotted him and waved. Bill looked at him for a moment, then tugged his hat snugly on his head, turned and ran the other way.
Now he wondered what had become of Ronny. He wondered what the odds were that he was part of this march, and if not this one, then another one in some other city. He liked the idea and hoped that it was true.
The protesters moved steadily towards the city center, spanning the thoroughfare from sidewalk to sidewalk. Bill glanced around at the signs held aloft: “Black Lives Matter,” “Stop the Hate,” “I Can’t Breathe,” “Silence is Violence.” There were chants of “No justice, no peace,” shout-outs to various people and the rolling hum of multiple conversations. Bill felt his T-shirt dampen with sweat and took sips from his water bottle. Energized by the crowd and the bright, cloudless day, he turned to Nancy and said he was glad they came. She nodded and smiled but when she didn’t loop her arm through his and lean closer, he felt a pang of disappointment.
As they reached the city center, a small group of counter-protesters wearing red Trump and MAGA caps stood along the sidewalk, waving a blue lives matter flag and exchanging shouted exhortations and curses with some of the protesters. Bill glanced at them as he passed. Middle-aged men and women, the kind he might see at the grocery store or at a kids’ soccer game. One of the men caught his eye, and reflexively Bill started to nod. The man’s face dissolved into a scornful glare as he shot his middle finger at Bill and screamed, “Fuck you!”
Bill stared at the man, then started to walk towards him, gripped by an unexpected rush of anger. He imagined ripping the MAGA cap off the man’s head, driving his fist into the middle of the man’s fat face.
He felt Nancy grasp his hand. “Bill?” When he didn’t turn, she tightened her grip and said, “Ignore him.”
“He’s a fucking asshole.”
“I know. Come on.” She pulled him back into the flow of the march.
“Hey,” Nancy said. “We’re doing something good here, right?”
He looked at her. She was smiling, but he could tell he had frightened her. “Right.”
“Well then.”
He nodded. They were doing something good here, or at least something that made him feel good, unlike the hours spent daily in the corporate grind. He made no apologies for the career he had chosen. It allowed him to provide a good life for Nancy and Ellen, and for himself, if he was honest. But he didn’t feel like it connected him to anything except his own prosperity.
~ ~ ~
On Monday morning he had a Zoom call with Walt to discuss a customer claim stemming from a system outage. The contract gave them air tight protection from the kind of damages the customer was seeking, but that was never the issue. The issue was keeping a good customer happy. Bill and Walt were charged with fact-finding and preparing a briefing for Jack.
Walt popped onto Bill’s computer screen wearing a red polo shirt with the company logo. He smiled at Bill, leaning back in his chair and sipping coffee from a company-logoed mug.
“Morning, counselor.”
“Hey, Walt. How’s it going?”
“Can’t complain.”
They exchanged bits of small talk. When Walt asked he what he had done that weekend, Bill paused for a moment.
“Well, as a matter of fact, Nancy and I went to the protest march in the city.”
Walt sat forward, a quizzical smile starting to form on his face. “Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
Walt chuckled, head slowly shaking. “Well, at least you have the guts to stand up for what you believe in. I can respect that.”
Bill hadn’t expected anything close to a compliment. “Thanks.”
“No, it’s true,” Walt continued. “I can respect it. I just don’t understand it. I mean, whose side are you on?” His voice was not dancing on the edge of sarcasm as it was when he baited Bill. Instead there was concern and a trace of anger.
Bill shrugged. “I believe I’m on the right side, Walt, the side that believes in justice.”
“Do you think it’s justice to destroy property and steal?”
“There was nothing like that going on this weekend.”
“Maybe not, but all you have to do is look at the news to see it is going on all across the country. Thugs smashing windows, looting, burning.”
“Are you calling me a thug?” Bill grinned.
Walt rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Of course not. But I do think you’re playing right into the hands of Antifa and all the left-wing radicals who want to destroy this country, including most of your precious Democrats.”
“Speaking of being played, what do you think your man Trump is doing to everyone who voted for him?”
“Trump,” Walt sat up, folding his thick arms across his chest, “is protecting guys like you and me.”
“Oh, come on, Walt. Do you really believe that?”
Walt stared at him, round, red face somber, eyes narrowed. “All I know is that this country has been going to hell for a long time. It’s not like it was when we were kids. All the things we were taught, respect, patriotism, hard work. They’re all gone. We have a goddamn welfare state. Guys like you and me work our asses off so the government can tax half of what we earn to support everyone on welfare and pay for all the government programs that benefit everyone but us. It’s a joke.”
Bill shook his head. “What the hell does that have to do with the protests?”
“The protests are a symptom of a larger disease.”
They were silent. Walt took a sip of coffee. Bill wondered what he could say that would make any difference. Should he tell Walt he was full of shit? After a moment he smiled.
“You’ll be pleased to know some guy, a counter-protester, told me to fuck off.”
“Yeah?”
Bill nodded. “I wanted to deck him but Nancy pulled me away.”
Walt grinned. “Good thing. You’re too old to get into fights.”
“True,” Bill said. “Very true.”
After the call he went to the kitchen to refill his coffee. Nancy was sitting at the kitchen table leafing through notes for her next class.
“It’s fresh,” she said.
“Thanks. How’s your day going so far?”
“Peachy. You?”
“I just got off a call with Walt. I told him we went to the protest and of course that got us off into politics.”
She looked up from her notes, a trace of smile crossing her face. “Did you tell him he was full of shit?”
Bill shook his head. “No, but I did push back on his nonsense. He said I was being played by the radical left, and I told him he was being suckered by Trump.”
Nancy considered this for a moment. “Good.”
Bill leaned against the counter and sipped his coffee. “He asked me what side I was on. Like we all have to choose sides now. Can you believe that?”
She gathered her notes and stood. “Yes.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.”
He thought about his father. Had he chosen sides the day he threw the hat into the fire, or when he moved them to a new neighborhood?
“Me too,” Bill said. As Nancy walked past him, he touched her arm. The light from the window caught her pale face, eyes bright blue, streaks of gray in her auburn hair. He stared at her trying to forestall a feeling of sadness. Then he kissed her. Pressing her fingers to his lips, she smiled and continued on her way out of the kitchen.
David C. Metz
When he was six years old Bill wore a red cowboy hat everywhere except at the dinner table and to bed. He wore it on the Saturday a new family moved into the house that backed up to the empty lot next to his. He and his father were raking leaves in the front yard. His father paused, leaned on his rake and stared across the empty lot at the children scurrying around.
“Huh,” his father said.
Leaning on the child’s rake his father had fashioned for him by sawing half the handle off an older one, Bill said, “Huh,” drawing a smile from his father. A Black woman in a yellow dress stepped out onto the back stoop of the house and called to the children, who scrambled inside. Bill’s father resumed raking.
In the early afternoon, his father burned leaves in a large steel barrel in their back yard. Plumes of gray smoke billowed upward and a pungent odor hung in the air. Bill watched for a while, then wandered to the front yard. Across the empty lot, a boy was tossing a baseball into the air and catching it. He stopped when he saw Bill approach.
“Hi,” Bill said.
The boy nodded. “Hello.” He looked to be Bill’s age. He wore blue jeans with patches on the knees and black high-top sneakers.
“My name is Bill.”
“Ronny.”
“Are you going to live here now?”
Ronny nodded, eyeing Bill’s hat.
“I live over there,” Bill said, pointing back towards his house.
“Uh-huh. I seen you earlier.” Ronny tossed the baseball above his head, then stepped back and caught it.
“Do you play baseball?”
Ronny shook his head. “Do you?”
“Not yet. My dad says I can try out for Little League next summer if I want to.”
“Do you?”
Bill shrugged. Ronny tossed his baseball into the air again and caught it.
“Can I try?” Bill asked.
Ronny looked at him. “Can I see your hat?”
Bill thought for a moment. He had never let anyone touch his hat, not even his best friend Pete, who lived two doors down in the other direction. Of course, Pete had his own cowboy hat.
“I won’t do anything to it,” Ronny said. “I just want to try it on.”
Bill nodded and they made the exchange. Bill flipped the ball between his hands, then into the air, sending it higher each time, until he felt dizzy from craning his head back to track it.
Ronny stuck the hat on his head and tugged it down to his ears. He started to gallop around the yard, pretending to ride a horse. He smiled at Bill and called “Giddy-up,” pulling the hat off his head and slapping it against imaginary haunches. Bill smiled in return as he stumbled backwards tracking his highest toss yet. He caught the ball just before he hit the ground. Ronny asked if he was okay. Bill nodded and stood.
The woman in the yellow dress appeared on the back stoop and called to Ronny to come inside. She lingered a moment until she saw Ronny remove the cowboy hat and hand it to Bill.
Bill gave Ronny the baseball.
“I guess I’ll see you later,” he said.
“Okay.” Ronny turned and ran towards the house.
Bill walked back across the vacant lot and up the driveway to the back yard where his father was tending the barrel of burning leaves.
“It smells good,” Bill said.
His father nodded. “I know. Nothing like the smell of burning leaves. One of the best signs of fall.” With the rake and his free hand, he scooped a pile of leaves into the barrel, sending up fresh plumes of smoke. “Were you playing with Pete?”
Bill shook his head. “I was playing with the new boy, Ronny. His family is the one that moved in over there.” He pointed in the direction of Ronny’s house.
“Oh, yeah?” His father stood back from the barrel and looked at him. “What did you do?”
“He let me play with his baseball and I let him wear my hat.”
“He wore your hat?”
Bill nodded. “We traded.”
His father frowned.
“Is that okay?” Bill asked.
His father leaned over and placed his hands on Bill’s shoulders. “I don’t think you can keep the hat.”
“Why? Did I do something wrong?”
“No.”
“Then why are you taking my hat away?’
His father’s brow furrowed and he let out a sigh.
“We don’t know those people, Bill. We don’t know anything about them. It’s not a good idea to share your hat with someone you don’t know.” His father gently lifted the hat off Bill’s head and dropped it into the barrel. It smoldered but did not burn. Bill stuck his head over the barrel and stared at it, the rising heat warming his cheeks, smoke stinging his eyes. The feeling he had done something wrong gnawed at him. He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll buy you a new one,” his father said. “I promise.”
~ ~ ~
The summer after George Floyd’s murder, Bill and his wife, Nancy, watched the protest marches on television.
“I know it bothers you,” he said, “but we made the right decision.”
“Did we?”
“Yes. There are other ways to be involved. We can write letters. We can write checks.”
They had agreed to stay home because of Covid, but he could tell she harbored doubts.
“And besides,” he said, “Ellen is there. Doesn’t that count?”
Their daughter lived in the city and had called to say she and her boyfriend were joining the protest. Bill told her to be careful and to wear a mask. He scanned the crowd shots thinking he might see her. They watched the coverage until past eleven before they went to bed.
He had trouble falling asleep. He lay on his back, staring into the dark, listening to the hum of the central air, the occasional pop of an air duct, trying to let his mind drift towards slumber.
Instead, he thought of Ronny and the hat. The memory had stayed with him, although he hadn’t told the story to anyone except Nancy, when they were in college. They’d been sharing a pizza and drinking beer in a small, dimly-lit café two blocks from campus. He’d been talking about his childhood, describing to this Chicago girl what it was like to grow up downstate, in a town that was mostly white, and ended up telling her about the hat.
“Your dad just threw the hat into the fire?” she asked.
She’d introduced him to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Wretched of the Earth and talked about racism and the politics of poverty with an earnestness that made him feel shallow and uninformed. She sometimes sat in the student union with a group of Black students whom Bill found slightly intimidating, which in turn embarrassed him because it wasn’t as if anyone said or did anything to make him feel unwelcomed. Nancy, with her red hair, blue eyes and creamy white skin, seemed totally at ease. When they first met, he wondered if she had dated any of the guys in the group, but never asked. She always greeted him with a kiss and, as the group’s discussion rolled on, rising and falling in intensity, looped her arm through his and leaned closer, displays of affection that reassured him. He loved feeling her pressed against him, watching her face as she spoke. He hoped she could see that he cared about the issues, even if he wasn’t as vocal.
“Basically. I mean my mom said something about head lice. I don’t know.”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Nancy shrugged and took a sip of beer. “You want that?” She pointed to the lone piece of pizza on the tray in the center of the table.
“You think my dad’s a racist?”
“I didn’t say that…”
“Because he’s not. I’ve never heard him utter a racist word.”
“Okay.”
“I mean nobody’s perfect. You told me your dad voted for Reagan. Twice.”
“I said okay.”
They split the last piece of pizza and stepped out into the warm spring night. During the walk to his apartment, they were quiet.
Later, lying next to her in his narrow bed, the room lit by a single candle on his dresser, he said he hadn’t meant to be so defensive.
She rested her hand on his chest. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why did you tell me about the hat?”
He thought for a moment, watched the play of candlelight on her shoulder.
“I don’t know. I think about it sometimes.”
“Did you ever play with that boy again?”
“Not really.” In fact, he had never played with him again. Ronny was assigned to the other first grade class, which meant they only saw each other on the school bus, in the cafeteria during lunch and at recess. Bill didn’t speak to him past a mumbled “Hi.” The following spring, Bill’s family moved to a new development on the other side of town.
“That’s kind of sad in a way.”
“Why?”
“It seems like a lost opportunity. I mean it could have changed your life. Both of your lives.”
“Hmmm.”
She propped herself on an elbow, looking at him. “I’m serious. We meet people all the time and never know which ones are going to make a difference in our lives.”
He nodded. He didn’t want to tell her how he had avoided Ronny, or try to explain why. He wasn’t sure he could explain the combination of confusion and shame he’d felt towards Ronny after his father tossed the hat into the fire.
Now the air conditioning cut off leaving the house suddenly quiet. He could hear Nancy’s soft, measured breathing. She’d been quiet as they got ready for bed. Once under the covers, she’d read until Ellen texted to say she was safely home, then kissed him goodnight and turned off her reading lamp.
“Are you all right?” he’d asked.
“I’m just tired.”
“I thought maybe you were upset that we didn’t go on the march.”
She turned on her side to face him. “I’m upset because of all the craziness in the world right now. Everything is upside down and I feel pretty helpless.”
He placed a hand on her cheek. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” She kissed his hand. “But I really am tired.” She rolled onto her other side. In a moment he heard the sound of her breathing.
~ ~ ~
The next morning, he poured a mug of coffee and went to his home office to get on a senior staff call via Zoom. He watched his computer monitor populate with faces in squares like the opening of The Brady Bunch, except they were all middle-aged White men. There were nods, hellos, bland exchanges of work gossip as they waited for the meeting to start. Then someone mentioned the protest and a few heads started to shake. Bill tuned out the discussion and thought instead of Ellen, imagined her holding hands with Mark, her boyfriend, and marching in solidarity with the other protesters, believing in something bigger than herself. He heard his name and focused on the screen. Walt, the engineering manager, was smiling.
“I was wondering what you think, Bill, you’re the lawyer in the group.” Walt said. “Should we defund the police? Do all lives matter or just black ones?” Walt was a stocky, pugnacious man who liked to bait Bill, knowing he was the lone liberal on the staff. When he’d first learned that Bill was a Democrat, Walt had stared at him as if Bill had admitted to being a registered sex offender.
Now he said, “C’mon, Walt.”
Walt screwed his pudgy face into a smirk. “What?”
Bill shook his head.
The face of Jack Taylor, the Regional VP and General Manager, popped onto the screen. “Sorry I’m late, I had an early call with corporate that ran over. What’d I miss?”
“Not much,” Walt said, “Bill was just defending rioters.” He grinned to let everyone know it was a joke.
“Is that right, Bill?”
“You know me, Jack, I can’t resist rousing rabble.”
“Right,” Jack said. “But we love you anyway.” He flashed a smile that radiated warmth and good will. It was a smile, Bill thought, that was either completely genuine, or so well practiced that no one could tell the difference. Either way, Bill succumbed to it every time.
When Jack first joined the company, he’d invited a few members of his staff, including Bill, for a drink after work. Drinks led to dinner and near the end, after the waiter had cleared their plates and brought coffee, Bill and the others listened as their new boss recalled hearing a sports talk radio show one day when the topic was an NBA player who was the baby daddy to four different women.
“One of the callers, who was obviously a Black guy, he says, ‘Frank’—the host’s name was Frank—he says,” and here Jack slipped into a high-pitched imitation of a Black dialect, “‘Frank, the boy can’t help it. He Black, he Black.’” Jack laughed. Bill’s colleagues laughed. Bill smiled and looked at his hands folded on the table.
He’d told Nancy about it when he got home.
“I didn’t know if it was some kind of code or a test or something.”
“Test for what?” Nancy asked.
Bill shrugged. “Political leaning. How liberal you are.”
“Sounds to me like a white guy telling some other white guys a dumbass racist story. Did you say anything?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. How about ‘Not funny?’”
“C’mon, Nancy. I’ve got to work with this guy.”
“So?”
“So, lecturing him about racial sensitivity is not the best way to kick off our relationship.”
She shook her head.
“What?”
“I don’t think I could let something like that go.”
He’d always thought it was easier for her, a high school social studies teacher, to stake out liberal positions, than it was for him, a corporate lawyer.
“Well,” he said, “you don’t have to.”
“But you do?”
“I have to pick my battles,” he said.
Now he listened as Jack ran through the numbers—the monthly update against quarterly targets. The pandemic had knocked business off stride for the current quarter, but if things settled down, they could still hit the annual goal. At the end of the call, Jack asked each of them if they had anything to share with the team.
“Nope, I’m good,” Bill said, when it was Jack called on him.
~ ~ ~
At dinner that evening, he told Nancy about his exchange with Walt.
“Didn’t you tell me he voted for Trump?”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “To be honest, I think most of those guys did, but Walt was the only one who talked about it.”
“What an asshole.”
“He’s a good engineer, and he is not a bad guy to work with, he really isn’t. He’s actually great to work with. I don’t know.” Bill took a sip of wine.
“What?”
“I’m always surprised by guys like Walt. I shouldn’t be, but I am.”
“Did you tell him he was full of shit?”
“No, I decided not to take the bait.” He stared at his wine glass. “It’s not like I’m going to change their minds. And they’re not bad guys, really. Like Jack. First person in his family to go to college, worked his way through. It’s what drives him, the belief he’s worked hard for everything and doesn’t owe anyone. It’s the same for a lot of those guys and I kind of admire them in a way. But still…” He shook his head.
“They should know better?”
He nodded. He’d always valued getting along, avoiding confrontation. He’d never asked his father about the hat because he didn’t want to have the conversation he knew would follow, wasn’t sure what the point of such a conversation would be. So, he’d left it. His father was not perfect, but he was a good man, and that was enough. It was a judgment he hoped to earn from his own child. And from Nancy.
“I’m sorry if I disappoint you.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t put it on me.”
“I’m not.”
She shook her head. “You kind of are, Bill.”
He slumped in his chair, sifted his wine glass.
“I don’t mean to put it on you, but it matters to me what you think.”
“I think the world is crazy and we all have to do our best to make it less so.”
“About me.”
“Well,” she said, “I think you’re intelligent and kind and good looking…”
“C’mon, Nancy.”
She leaned closer and placed her hand on his. “I love you, you know that, right? I don’t think it’s me you have to worry about disappointing.”
~ ~ ~
The following Saturday, he and Nancy drove into the city to join a protest. They found a parking space in a garage and walked half a mile to the park where protesters were gathering. The crowd was large and growing: men, women, young, middle-aged, black, white, Asian, parents with children. Bill thought he might be the oldest white man there. Nancy held his hand as they maneuvered into the throng and found a space. After several minutes, they began to march.
They fell in step next to a Black couple. The man was tall and thin, with close-cropped hair gone gray at the temples and black horn rimmed glasses that gave him a professorial air. The woman was shorter, full-figured, with tightly braided hair that tumbled between her shoulders. When the man caught his eye, Bill nodded. He wasn’t sure what to say.
As the march proceeded out of the park onto a wide thoroughfare, he grew conscious of being swept into a sea of strangers drawn together for a single purpose. It struck him how isolated he was in his daily life, how removed he had been, even before the pandemic, from anything as real as this protest.
He thought about the hat, the way it smoldered on top of the burning leaves, the acrid smell. The way his father assumed that a new hat would fix everything. And in a way, it did. When his father came home from work that Monday, he presented the new hat to Bill. It was identical to the old one. Bill put it on immediately and wore it until bedtime. His mother even allowed him to wear it at dinner. (“Just this once,” she’d said.)
He wore it outside after school the next day. He was going to play with his friend Pete, but as he crossed the front yard he looked across the empty lot and saw Ronny in his yard playing catch with himself as he had been on Saturday. Ronny spotted him and waved. Bill looked at him for a moment, then tugged his hat snugly on his head, turned and ran the other way.
Now he wondered what had become of Ronny. He wondered what the odds were that he was part of this march, and if not this one, then another one in some other city. He liked the idea and hoped that it was true.
The protesters moved steadily towards the city center, spanning the thoroughfare from sidewalk to sidewalk. Bill glanced around at the signs held aloft: “Black Lives Matter,” “Stop the Hate,” “I Can’t Breathe,” “Silence is Violence.” There were chants of “No justice, no peace,” shout-outs to various people and the rolling hum of multiple conversations. Bill felt his T-shirt dampen with sweat and took sips from his water bottle. Energized by the crowd and the bright, cloudless day, he turned to Nancy and said he was glad they came. She nodded and smiled but when she didn’t loop her arm through his and lean closer, he felt a pang of disappointment.
As they reached the city center, a small group of counter-protesters wearing red Trump and MAGA caps stood along the sidewalk, waving a blue lives matter flag and exchanging shouted exhortations and curses with some of the protesters. Bill glanced at them as he passed. Middle-aged men and women, the kind he might see at the grocery store or at a kids’ soccer game. One of the men caught his eye, and reflexively Bill started to nod. The man’s face dissolved into a scornful glare as he shot his middle finger at Bill and screamed, “Fuck you!”
Bill stared at the man, then started to walk towards him, gripped by an unexpected rush of anger. He imagined ripping the MAGA cap off the man’s head, driving his fist into the middle of the man’s fat face.
He felt Nancy grasp his hand. “Bill?” When he didn’t turn, she tightened her grip and said, “Ignore him.”
“He’s a fucking asshole.”
“I know. Come on.” She pulled him back into the flow of the march.
“Hey,” Nancy said. “We’re doing something good here, right?”
He looked at her. She was smiling, but he could tell he had frightened her. “Right.”
“Well then.”
He nodded. They were doing something good here, or at least something that made him feel good, unlike the hours spent daily in the corporate grind. He made no apologies for the career he had chosen. It allowed him to provide a good life for Nancy and Ellen, and for himself, if he was honest. But he didn’t feel like it connected him to anything except his own prosperity.
~ ~ ~
On Monday morning he had a Zoom call with Walt to discuss a customer claim stemming from a system outage. The contract gave them air tight protection from the kind of damages the customer was seeking, but that was never the issue. The issue was keeping a good customer happy. Bill and Walt were charged with fact-finding and preparing a briefing for Jack.
Walt popped onto Bill’s computer screen wearing a red polo shirt with the company logo. He smiled at Bill, leaning back in his chair and sipping coffee from a company-logoed mug.
“Morning, counselor.”
“Hey, Walt. How’s it going?”
“Can’t complain.”
They exchanged bits of small talk. When Walt asked he what he had done that weekend, Bill paused for a moment.
“Well, as a matter of fact, Nancy and I went to the protest march in the city.”
Walt sat forward, a quizzical smile starting to form on his face. “Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
Walt chuckled, head slowly shaking. “Well, at least you have the guts to stand up for what you believe in. I can respect that.”
Bill hadn’t expected anything close to a compliment. “Thanks.”
“No, it’s true,” Walt continued. “I can respect it. I just don’t understand it. I mean, whose side are you on?” His voice was not dancing on the edge of sarcasm as it was when he baited Bill. Instead there was concern and a trace of anger.
Bill shrugged. “I believe I’m on the right side, Walt, the side that believes in justice.”
“Do you think it’s justice to destroy property and steal?”
“There was nothing like that going on this weekend.”
“Maybe not, but all you have to do is look at the news to see it is going on all across the country. Thugs smashing windows, looting, burning.”
“Are you calling me a thug?” Bill grinned.
Walt rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Of course not. But I do think you’re playing right into the hands of Antifa and all the left-wing radicals who want to destroy this country, including most of your precious Democrats.”
“Speaking of being played, what do you think your man Trump is doing to everyone who voted for him?”
“Trump,” Walt sat up, folding his thick arms across his chest, “is protecting guys like you and me.”
“Oh, come on, Walt. Do you really believe that?”
Walt stared at him, round, red face somber, eyes narrowed. “All I know is that this country has been going to hell for a long time. It’s not like it was when we were kids. All the things we were taught, respect, patriotism, hard work. They’re all gone. We have a goddamn welfare state. Guys like you and me work our asses off so the government can tax half of what we earn to support everyone on welfare and pay for all the government programs that benefit everyone but us. It’s a joke.”
Bill shook his head. “What the hell does that have to do with the protests?”
“The protests are a symptom of a larger disease.”
They were silent. Walt took a sip of coffee. Bill wondered what he could say that would make any difference. Should he tell Walt he was full of shit? After a moment he smiled.
“You’ll be pleased to know some guy, a counter-protester, told me to fuck off.”
“Yeah?”
Bill nodded. “I wanted to deck him but Nancy pulled me away.”
Walt grinned. “Good thing. You’re too old to get into fights.”
“True,” Bill said. “Very true.”
After the call he went to the kitchen to refill his coffee. Nancy was sitting at the kitchen table leafing through notes for her next class.
“It’s fresh,” she said.
“Thanks. How’s your day going so far?”
“Peachy. You?”
“I just got off a call with Walt. I told him we went to the protest and of course that got us off into politics.”
She looked up from her notes, a trace of smile crossing her face. “Did you tell him he was full of shit?”
Bill shook his head. “No, but I did push back on his nonsense. He said I was being played by the radical left, and I told him he was being suckered by Trump.”
Nancy considered this for a moment. “Good.”
Bill leaned against the counter and sipped his coffee. “He asked me what side I was on. Like we all have to choose sides now. Can you believe that?”
She gathered her notes and stood. “Yes.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.”
He thought about his father. Had he chosen sides the day he threw the hat into the fire, or when he moved them to a new neighborhood?
“Me too,” Bill said. As Nancy walked past him, he touched her arm. The light from the window caught her pale face, eyes bright blue, streaks of gray in her auburn hair. He stared at her trying to forestall a feeling of sadness. Then he kissed her. Pressing her fingers to his lips, she smiled and continued on her way out of the kitchen.