Cindy’s hands landed flat between my father’s shoulder blades.
I saw it happen from six feet away. I was holding a paper plate of potato salad. Dad was standing at the end of the old wooden dock, looking out over the farm pond the way he looks at everything, quiet and patient, his good straw hat pushed back on his head.
Cindy came up behind him laughing and shoved.
Dad went in with a heavy, flat splash that sent brown water up over the dock boards. His hat landed upside down on the surface and turned in a slow circle.
He came up sputtering, waist-deep beside the dock. His light blue button-up shirt was soaked to the chest. The water came up past his belt buckle.
His hand went to his left ear. Then his right.
Nothing there.
Forty people at the reunion went quiet at once. Somebody’s radio kept playing an old George Strait song up by the barn. A kid on the tire swing stopped swinging.
Cindy stood on the dock behind me with her paper plate in one hand. She was smiling.
“Oh, Leon, lighten up,” she said. “You should’ve taken them out.”
He couldn’t hear a word she said.
I dropped my plate. Potato salad went across the dock boards. I got down on my knees in my yellow sundress and reached for my father’s hand.
“Daddy. Give me your hand.”
He looked up at me. His face was white under his tan, and his eyes were scared, really scared, in a way I’d never seen them. His mouth moved, but he was talking too loud, the way he does when he can’t hear himself.
“Kayla? Kayla, I can’t hear. They’re gone. Both of ’em.”
My father is sixty-eight years old. He climbed utility poles for the Ozark Rural Electric Cooperative for thirty-eight years, through ice storms and tornadoes and hundred-degree Augusts. When the big ice storm of 2007 took down half the lines in southwest Missouri, he worked nineteen days straight and slept in his truck.
He doesn’t fall in ponds.
I got both hands around his wrist and pulled. He found his footing in the mud and climbed out onto the bank, water pouring off him, his boots squelching. He stood there dripping, patting his ears over and over, like the hearing aids might come back if he just checked one more time.
My name is Kayla Brandt. I’m thirty-four, and I work as the billing coordinator at a dental office in Ozark, Missouri. I spend my days on the phone with insurance companies, explaining why a crown isn’t cosmetic and why a deep cleaning really is necessary. I know exactly what things cost. I know which insurance pays for what, and I know which ones pay for nothing at all.
And I know exactly what pond water does to anything with a battery in it.
That reunion was on the second Saturday in June, at the Brandt family farm outside Rogersville. It belongs to my husband Josh’s Uncle Gene. Every summer, the whole Brandt clan comes from all over Missouri and Arkansas: forty or fifty people, folding tables under the pecan trees, a smoker going since four in the morning, kids running wild in the hayfield, and the old men fishing off the dock.
It’s the kind of family event where everybody’s happy and nobody looks too closely at anything.
My father wasn’t a Brandt. He came because Josh invited him. Every year since my mother died, Josh has called him in May and said, “Leon, you’re coming to the reunion. Gene’s smoking a brisket, and I need somebody who can actually catch a fish.”
Dad always came. He always brought a pecan pie from the bakery in Ozark, because he never learned to bake after Mom passed, and he always stood a little off to the side, smiling, not quite part of it but glad to be asked.
I want you to understand that he was a guest. He was invited. And my mother-in-law pushed him into a pond.
Josh was up the hill helping Uncle Gene with the brisket when it happened. He heard the splash and the silence after it and came running down through the pecan trees with a pair of barbecue tongs still in his hand.
By the time he reached the dock, I already had Dad out of the water.
“What happened?” Josh said, breathing hard. “Leon, you okay?”
“He can’t hear you,” I said. “His hearing aids are gone.”
Josh looked at Dad, soaking wet and patting his ears. Then he looked at the dock.
His mother was still standing at the end of it with her paper plate, her coral lipstick perfect, her hair sprayed into its usual blond helmet.
“It was a joke, Joshie,” Cindy said, and laughed. “I didn’t push him that hard. How was I supposed to know he had those things in? Everybody takes their stuff out before they go near the water.”
“He wasn’t going near the water, Mom. He was standing on the dock.”
“Well, he should’ve been more careful.”
Josh’s face went tight. I watched him swallow whatever he wanted to say. Forty relatives were watching, and that’s a lot of eyes on a man about to yell at his mother at his own family reunion.
I knew what everybody was thinking, because I was thinking it too. Nobody calls the sheriff over a family reunion. Nobody calls a lawyer because somebody’s mother-in-law got silly on a dock. She was Josh’s mother. If this got fixed, it would have to be fixed by us.
“Let’s find them,” Josh said.
He kicked off his shoes, rolled up his jeans, and waded into the pond. Two of his cousins, Tyler and Brent, followed him in without being asked. All afternoon and into the evening, the three of them walked the bottom of that pond with their bare feet, shuffling slowly through the mud in a line, feeling for anything small and hard.
The water was murky and brown, about five feet deep at the end of the dock. Somebody brought a rake from the barn. Uncle Gene brought a big flashlight when the sun started going down.
They found a fishing lure, a beer can from probably 1985, and a kid’s flip-flop.
Not the hearing aids.
While they searched, I sat with Dad on a hay bale by the barn. Josh’s Aunt Peggy brought him a dry flannel shirt and a towel, and he changed behind the barn and came back with his wet shirt folded neatly over his arm, because that’s my father. Even in the worst moment, he folds his shirt.
He sat beside me and stared at the pond.
I knew those hearing aids. Dad had bought them three and a half years earlier at an audiology clinic in Springfield. They were good ones, rechargeable, with Bluetooth so he could hear phone calls right in his ears. He’d paid $4,100 for the pair, out of his savings, in cash.
I’d gone with him that day. I’d read the paperwork, because I read everyone’s paperwork. The price included a three-year loss and damage warranty: if they were lost, stolen, or damaged, the manufacturer would replace them once for a small deductible.
The warranty ran out at three years.
He’d had them three and a half.
And Medicare doesn’t pay for hearing aids. Not one dime. I deal with insurance every day, and that’s the rule that makes my patients the angriest. Original Medicare covers a hearing test if your doctor orders it, but not the hearing aids themselves. Dad has Original Medicare and a supplement plan, and none of it would help him.
So my father, a widower living on his co-op pension and Social Security, had just lost $4,100 he couldn’t get back, because my mother-in-law thought it would be funny.
The sun went down. Josh came out of the pond shaking his head, mud up to his knees.
Dad leaned close to me on the hay bale and spoke too loud, the way he does now when he can’t hear.
“Don’t make trouble with her on my account, sis.”
He’s called me sis since I was little. I don’t know where it came from. My mother used to say it was because he’d wanted a boy and settled for calling me something that sounded like one.
“Daddy…”
“I mean it.” He gripped my hand. His fingers were still cold from the pond. “She’s Josh’s mama. You got to live with these people. I’m just an old man at somebody else’s picnic.”
“You’re not just an old man. You’re my dad.”
He couldn’t hear me. He just patted my hand and nodded, like he understood anyway.
I didn’t say one word to Cindy that day.
I want to be honest about why. It wasn’t because I wasn’t angry. I was so angry my hands were shaking. It was because I knew if I opened my mouth in front of forty Brandts, I wouldn’t be able to stop. And Josh would be the one standing in the middle of it, and Dad would be the reason, and he would hate that more than losing the hearing aids.
So I helped my father to my car. I drove him home to his little house in Ozark with the windows down, because he likes the night air. At every stoplight I wrote notes on the back of a receipt and held them up so he could read them.
Are you cold?
He shook his head.
Do you want me to stay tonight?
He shook his head again. “I’ll be fine, sis. I got Duke.”
Duke is his old beagle. He’s fourteen, half blind, and as stubborn as Dad.
When we pulled into his driveway, I walked him to the door. Then he did something that made my throat close up.
He stopped on the porch, turned around, and said too loud, “I won’t hear the phone. If you call, I won’t hear it. You’ll have to text me.”
He’d had those hearing aids for three and a half years. Before them, he’d gone ten years pretending he could hear, nodding along at church and at the bank and at my wedding, missing half of every conversation. He told me once that buying them was like somebody turning the lights back on in a house he didn’t know had gone dark.
Now the lights were off again.
I drove home and found Josh sitting on our back steps in the dark, still muddy from the knees down, a beer in his hand that he wasn’t drinking.
I sat down beside him and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“She pushed him, Kayla,” he finally said. “I saw her hands on his back when I came down the hill. That wasn’t a little bump.”
“I know. I was standing right there.”
“And she laughed.”
“She laughed.”
He put his face in his hands.
I need to tell you about Cindy, because otherwise none of this makes sense.
Cindy Brandt is Josh’s mother. She’s fifty-nine, a few months short of sixty. She’s divorced from Josh’s father, Rick, who moved to Tulsa with a woman from his bowling league fifteen years ago and sends Josh a text on his birthday most years.
Cindy is the loudest person in every room. She has opinions about everything and announces all of them. She runs on attention the way a car runs on gas. When things are about her, she’s charming and funny and generous with compliments. When they aren’t, she finds a way to make them about her.
She’s not a monster. I want to be fair about that. She loves Josh in her own way. She’s good with our nephews. She’s the first one to bring a casserole when somebody’s sick.
But she’s careless with other people. With their feelings, their time, and their things. And when she breaks something, she laughs and tells you to lighten up.
At our wedding seven years ago, she gave a toast at the reception that lasted eleven minutes and was mostly about her own wedding. When Josh and I bought our house, she showed up on moving day, criticized the kitchen cabinets, and left before anything got carried in.
Two years ago, Josh co-signed a loan for her car, a white Buick Enclave, because her credit wasn’t good enough after the divorce. She missed three payments. Each time, the credit union called Josh, and Josh paid it so his own credit wouldn’t take the hit. That was $1,467 she never paid back. She never mentioned it, and Josh never asked.
And she’d never been kind to my father. Not mean, exactly. Just dismissive. At Christmas she talked over him. At the reunions she called him “Josh’s wife’s daddy” instead of his name. At Thanksgiving she once asked him, loudly, in front of everybody, whether he could even hear what she was saying, and then laughed when he said “What?”
My father has never said one unkind word about her. Not one.
So here’s what I hadn’t told anybody.
For eighteen months, Josh and I had been putting back $250 a month into a savings account at our credit union. The account was labeled MOM’S 60TH on our banking app.
We were going to send Cindy on a cruise for her sixtieth birthday next spring: four nights out of Galveston to Cozumel, an ocean-view cabin, with a little extra for her shore excursions and souvenirs. It was Josh’s idea. His mother had always wanted to go on a cruise. She’d talked about it his whole life. She’d never been anywhere farther than Branson.
By June, the account held $4,500.
And Cindy knew. Josh had made the mistake of mentioning it at Christmas, with the details still fuzzy, and she had grabbed onto it with both hands. She’d been telling the whole beauty shop about it ever since.
Every Friday morning, Cindy got her hair done at Darlene’s Shear Elegance on Main Street. Every Friday since Christmas, according to everyone in town, she’d told the ladies under the dryers about her cruise. “My son is sending me on a cruise for my sixtieth. Out of Galveston. Ocean view. He’s such a good boy.”
She’d already bought cruise clothes. She’d shown me a new swimsuit cover-up and three sundresses from Dillard’s, charged to her store card. She’d bought a waterproof phone case and a sun hat with a brim the size of a hubcap.
The cruise wasn’t booked yet. We were waiting for the spring prices to drop. The money was still sitting in our account.
That Sunday evening, the day after the reunion, I sat with Josh on our back steps again. The cicadas were loud in the oak trees. The light was going gold over the neighbor’s soybean field.
I’d been thinking about it all day.
“I want to spend it on Dad,” I said.
Josh didn’t answer right away. He looked out at the yard for a long time, at the clothesline, the swing set we’d put up for the nephews, the garden with its rows of green beans.
I’d spent the morning doing what I do at work. I’d made phone calls and gotten the facts.
