The Woman in the Orange Hat

Maya wears an orange hat to work every Tuesday. It's this bright, ridiculous thing—wide-brimmed, like something a garden party attendee would wear in 1962. In a sea of gray suits and muted blouses, she's a bruised peach. We've never spoken, but I've memorized the way she sits at her desk three rows over, the hat perched on her filing cabinet like a watching bird.

Today, HR called her into the glass office. No hat. Her hair—this wild gray halo that she usually pins back—fell around her face as she gathered her things. I watched from my cubicle, pretending to type, my fingers frozen over the keyboard. A strand of my own hair came loose from my bun, and I tucked it behind my ear with shaking hands.

She walked past my row on her way out. Our eyes met for half a second. I wanted to say something—"this is wrong" or "I'll miss you" or anything at all. Instead I looked down at my keyboard, my phone, anything but her face.

The orange hat stayed on her filing cabinet. Security would box it up with her stapler and her coffee mug and the photograph of her granddaughter that I'd seen her straightening a hundred times. Or they'd throw it away. Corporate waste doesn't get forwarded addresses.

At lunch, I found myself standing in front of her empty desk. The hat was still there. I don't know what came over me—maybe it was the fifteen years of my own silence, every meeting where I'd nodded along, every email I'd sent instead of walking down the hall—but I reached out and touched the brim.

Security cleared his throat behind me.

I dropped my hand. But in that moment, looking at that ridiculous orange hat and my own trembling fingers and the way the fluorescent lights caught the gray strands I've been dyeing for three years, I understood something about courage. Some people wear it on their heads. Some of us just watch them go.

I never learned her last name.