First I called Dad’s homeowner’s insurance agent, a nice man named Mr. Kessler at the Farm Bureau office in Ozark. I asked whether Dad’s policy would cover the hearing aids.
“I’m sorry, Kayla,” he said. “Unless he’d added them to his policy as scheduled personal property, a standard homeowner’s policy generally doesn’t cover something just being lost in a pond. It covers things like fire and theft. Dropping something in the water isn’t one of the covered causes. I wish I had better news.”
Then I called the audiology clinic in Springfield. The office manager confirmed that the loss and damage warranty on Dad’s pair had expired six months earlier. A new comparable pair would run between $4,000 and $4,500, depending on the model. They offered financing through a medical credit card, at zero interest for twelve months but twenty-six percent after that.
I knew all about those medical credit cards from work. I’ve seen them swallow older patients whole.
Then, God help me, I looked up the small claims court rules in Missouri. You can sue someone in small claims for up to $5,000 without a lawyer. The filing fee in Greene County is around forty dollars. I could have filed against Cindy for the full $4,100, and I had forty witnesses.
I sat at my kitchen table and imagined it. Me and Dad on one side of a courtroom. Cindy on the other, in her coral lipstick. Josh in the middle, having to testify about his own mother.
I closed the laptop.
“I’m not suing your mother,” I told Josh on the steps. “I thought about it. I looked it up. But I’m not putting you through that. And Dad would never forgive me.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”
“But I’m not letting him go deaf again either. He can’t afford it, Josh. He’s on a fixed income. His pension from the co-op is eighteen hundred a month, and his Social Security is about fourteen hundred. His property taxes and his supplement premium alone eat up a big chunk of that. He’d put it on one of those twenty-six percent cards before he’d ask me for help. Or he’d just go without. He went without for ten years before.”
Josh still didn’t say anything.
“The cruise money is ours,” I said. “We saved it. We earned it. And your mother is the reason my dad can’t hear the phone ring.”
Josh set down his beer.
“It was ours to give,” he said finally, still looking at the yard. “Do it.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.
Then he said something that made me love him more than I already did.
“And I’ll tell Mom myself.”
“Josh, you don’t have to…”
“Yes, I do.” He turned and looked at me. His eyes were wet. “She pushed your father into a pond, Kayla. Then she laughed at him. And I stood there with a pair of barbecue tongs and didn’t say a single word to her because forty people were watching.” He shook his head. “I’m thirty-six years old. I’m done being scared of my mother.”
I put my head on his shoulder. We sat there until the fireflies came out over the soybeans.
On Monday morning I called the dental office and took a personal day. Dr. Halverson, my boss, didn’t even ask why. He just said, “Take care of whatever it is, Kayla.”
I picked Dad up at eight. He was waiting on his porch in his church clothes, a pressed white shirt and his good khakis, his hair combed with water. He’d dressed up for the audiologist the way men of his generation dress up for the bank or the doctor.
He climbed into my car. “Where are we going, sis?”
I’d written it out on a yellow legal pad the night before. I held it up.
Springfield. Audiologist. New hearing aids. My treat.
He read it twice, and his face changed.
“No, ma’am,” he said too loud. “No. I’ll figure something out.”
I flipped the page. I’d written the next part ahead of time, because I knew exactly what he’d say.
Already made the appointment. 9:30. Don’t argue with me. You taught me not to quit.
He looked at that for a long time. Then he looked out the windshield, and his jaw worked.
“Your mama would’ve done the same thing,” he finally said. “Stubborn as a mule. Just like you.”
We drove the forty minutes to Springfield in silence. He couldn’t hear the radio, so I left it off. He watched the cattle fields and the cell towers go by, and every so often he’d point at something, a hawk on a fence post, a new subdivision going in, and I’d nod.
The audiology clinic was in a brick building off South National Avenue. The audiologist was a calm young woman named Dr. Nguyen with gentle hands and a soft voice. She’d fitted Dad’s original pair and remembered him.
“Mr. Lowery! How are those hearing aids treating you?”
Dad looked at me helplessly. I wrote on my pad: She asked about your hearing aids.
“They’re at the bottom of a pond,” he said loudly.
Dr. Nguyen’s eyebrows went up.
I explained the rest in a low voice while Dad sat in the chair.
Dr. Nguyen listened. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Losing them is hard on anybody. For someone his age, it can be really isolating. People stop going out. They stop talking on the phone. It happens faster than you’d think.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why we’re here.”
She ran a new hearing test. Dad’s hearing had gotten a little worse in three and a half years, which is normal. She recommended the newest version of the same model, slightly stronger, rechargeable, with the same Bluetooth connection to his phone.
Then she printed the quote and slid it across the desk.
The new pair came to $4,300. That included the fitting, follow-up adjustments for a year, and a new three-year loss and damage warranty.
“We have financing options,” Dr. Nguyen said gently.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll pay today.”
I took out my debit card for our joint savings account, the one labeled MOM’S 60TH.
Dad saw the number on the quote and grabbed my arm.
“Kayla. That’s too much. That’s your money.”
I didn’t argue. I wrote on my legal pad in big block letters and held it up so he could read it.
IT’S FAMILY MONEY. YOU’RE FAMILY.
He read it. His chin trembled. He looked down at his big, scarred hands, the hands that had climbed poles for thirty-eight years, and didn’t say anything.
I handed the card to the receptionist. She ran it, and the machine beeped. Approved.
There was $200 left in the account labeled MOM’S 60TH.
Out in the parking lot, Dad stopped beside my car and kept shaking his head.
“That’s your money, Kayla,” he said again, too loud. “Your and Josh’s money. You been saving it for something.”
I didn’t tell him what for. I’ve never told him. He doesn’t know to this day that the money was meant for Cindy’s cruise. I think it would break his heart, and I think he’d try to pay it back, a hundred dollars at a time out of his pension, for the rest of his life.
So I just wrote: We were saving it for something important. This is important.
He folded the page carefully, tore it off the pad, and put it in his shirt pocket.
The new hearing aids had to be ordered from the manufacturer. Dr. Nguyen said it would take three days.
Those three days were hard. I called Dad every morning and every evening by FaceTime, so he could see my face and read my lips. On Tuesday, he didn’t answer. I drove over on my lunch break, my heart in my throat, and found him in the backyard pulling weeds. He hadn’t heard the phone.
On Wednesday, the pharmacy in Ozark called his house phone to say his blood pressure prescription was ready. He didn’t hear that either. I found out because the pharmacist, a sweet woman named Gloria who’s known Dad for twenty years, called me instead.
“Kayla, honey, is your daddy okay? He didn’t pick up, and he always picks up.”
“He’s okay, Gloria. He just can’t hear right now. It’s a long story.”
That night, Josh came home from work at the John Deere dealership and found me crying at the kitchen table.
“He’s going to be okay,” Josh said, putting his arms around me. “Thursday. Just one more day.”
“It’s not just the hearing aids,” I said into his shirt. “It’s that she did this to him, and she doesn’t even care. She hasn’t called. She hasn’t texted. Nothing. She doesn’t even know if he’s okay.”
Josh held me tighter. “She called me,” he said quietly.
I pulled back. “When?”
“Yesterday. She wanted to know if we’d booked the cruise yet. Said the spring prices were dropping, and Darlene at the beauty shop had a cousin who works for a travel agency.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we’d talk Saturday. In person.” He wiped my face with his thumb. “I’m not doing it on the phone, Kayla. She’s going to look at me when I tell her.”
On Thursday, they fitted the new hearing aids.
Dr. Nguyen put them in Dad’s ears in her little exam room with the pictures of mountains on the walls. She plugged them into her computer and adjusted the settings while Dad sat very still in the chair, hands folded in his lap.
“Mr. Lowery,” she said in her normal voice. “Can you hear me?”
Dad’s whole face changed.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. And for the first time in five days, he said it at a normal volume. He didn’t have to shout.
“How does my voice sound?”
“Sounds like you.” He laughed, and his voice cracked. “Sounds just like you.”
Dr. Nguyen spent half an hour showing him how to charge them, how to clean them, and how to connect them to his phone. Then she showed him something new.
“These have a ‘find my hearing aid’ feature on your phone,” she said. “If you ever lose one, the app can show you the last place it was connected.”
“Wouldn’t have helped in the pond,” Dad said dryly.
Dr. Nguyen laughed. “No. But you might want to keep them out of ponds from now on.”
“Wasn’t my idea to go in,” he said.
At the front desk, I asked about one more thing. I’d called Mr. Kessler at Farm Bureau again on Wednesday.
“You can add the new hearing aids to your dad’s homeowner’s policy as scheduled personal property,” he’d told me. “Then they’re covered for loss, even if they get dropped in a pond. It’ll cost him about forty dollars a year. All I need is the receipt.”
I got a copy of the receipt from the clinic, and that afternoon I emailed it to Mr. Kessler. By Friday the hearing aids were listed by serial number on Dad’s policy, covered for $4,300 against any kind of loss.
I’ll tell you, I’ve never been so happy to pay forty dollars in my life.
When we walked out of the clinic into the parking lot, Dad stopped under the oak trees along the sidewalk.
He tilted his head.
“What kind of bird is that?”
I listened. Up in the oak tree, a mockingbird was going through every song it knew: a cardinal, a blue jay, a robin, the squeak of a gate, something that sounded almost like a car alarm. Over and over, running through its whole list, one song after another.
“It’s a mockingbird, Daddy.”
“A mockingbird,” he repeated softly.
He stood there in the parking lot of a medical building on South National Avenue, in his pressed white shirt and his good khakis, with his head tilted back and his eyes closed, listening like it was the first bird God ever made.
I had to look at the pavement for a minute.
Mom used to love mockingbirds. She kept a bird feeder outside the kitchen window of their house on Elm Street for thirty years, and she could name every bird that came to it. When she was dying, in the hospice room at Mercy Hospital, a mockingbird sat outside her window every morning for a week and sang. She said it was the prettiest sound she’d ever heard.
Dad hadn’t been able to hear it. That was before he got his first hearing aids.
He told me once, after she passed, that he’d sat by her bed every morning and watched her smile at that bird, and he couldn’t hear a single note.
Now he stood under the oak tree and listened to the mockingbird for a long, long time.
“Your mama would’ve known what all those songs were,” he said quietly. “Every one of ’em.”
“I know, Daddy.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. He’d heard me. He’d heard me say it in a normal voice, standing three feet away.
He put his arms around me right there in the parking lot and held on.
On Saturday morning, Josh drove out to his mother’s place, and I rode along.
Cindy lives in a tan double-wide on two acres outside Rogersville, about three miles from Uncle Gene’s farm. The yard is full of ceramic geese, wind chimes, and a sign by the porch that says THIS IS MY HAPPY PLACE. Her white Buick Enclave, the one Josh co-signed for, was parked in the gravel drive.
Josh didn’t say much on the drive. His hands were tight on the steering wheel of his truck. At a stop sign on Highway 125, he looked over at me.
“If I start backing down,” he said, “you squeeze my hand.”
“You won’t back down.”
“I’ve been backing down from her my whole life, Kayla.”
“Not today.”
When we pulled into the gravel drive, Cindy came down her porch steps to meet us in the front yard. She was wearing one of the new Dillard’s sundresses, a turquoise one with big white hibiscus flowers, and her hair was freshly done. Friday had been beauty shop day.
“There’s my boy,” she said, holding her arms out.
Josh didn’t hug her.
He stood in the gravel with his hands in his jacket pockets, and he looked straight at his mother.
“Mom, there’s no cruise.”
She laughed. It was the same laugh from the dock, high and bright and careless.
“Very funny.”
“It’s not a joke,” he said. “Kayla spent it Monday. On Leon’s ears.”
Cindy looked at me. Then at her son. Then she opened her mouth.
What came out was a sound I’d never heard from her before. It wasn’t a word. It was a kind of strangled gasp, like somebody had knocked the wind out of her.
“You spent my cruise money,” she said finally, very slowly, “on that old man’s hearing aids?”
“It wasn’t your money, Mom. It was ours. We saved it. And yes, we spent it on Leon’s hearing aids. The ones you knocked into the pond.”
