The Hearing Aids I Brought to Recess

They are behind-the-ear aids, purple, because she picked the color. They have custom earmolds that we replace every year as her ears grow.

They run on tiny batteries, size 312, and the battery doors lock with a little tool so a small child can’t swallow anything. Emma has been changing her own batteries since she was seven.

Chad and I divorced when Emma was five. It wasn’t anybody’s big villain story. We married young, we both worked too much, and somewhere along the way we stopped talking about anything but bills.

We split the furniture and the friends as fairly as we could, and we agreed Emma came first.

He has her every other weekend, from Friday after school until Monday morning, when he drops her at the curb on his way to an early shift at the elevator. She hops out before the truck has quite stopped, and he has never once seen her ears.

He works at the co-op elevator in town. In spring he also helps his brother Mike on the farm, because Mike’s knees aren’t what they were and somebody has to string the wire.

Chad married Kendall two years ago. She’s thirty-five, four years younger than me, and she works at the bank in the next town over. She is pretty and organized and keeps a very clean house.

I’d met her maybe a dozen times, mostly in the school parking lot and once at a Christmas program, where she sat with Chad’s mother and clapped politely.

She was never mean to Emma, as far as I knew. She just never seemed easy around her. Emma said Kendall had a lot of rules, which didn’t bother me.

Rules are fine. Every house has them. I had my own list of rules, and Emma thought mine were just as bad.

But there had been little things. A few months earlier Emma came home from a weekend and told me Kendall said she “used her ears as an excuse.”

Another time Kendall told her she didn’t need to wear the hearing aids at the supper table because “we’re right here, we can just talk louder.”

I had mentioned that to Chad on the phone, and the call went sideways fast. He thought I was picking at his wife. I thought he wasn’t listening.

By the end of it we were both talking about things from four years ago that had nothing to do with hearing aids, and Emma was in the next room hearing every word, because of course she had her aids in.

After that, I’d learned to let the small things go. Chad and I had worked hard to stop fighting in front of her. I wasn’t going to start again over a supper table rule.

This was not a supper table rule.

I stood at the front desk with my hand still on the phone and thought about calling Chad.

Anybody would have. It was the obvious thing, and later more than one person asked me why I didn’t.

Here is the plain truth. A phone call would have started a fight, and a fight would not put sound in Emma’s ears before lunch. Chad would get defensive.

I would get sharp. He would call Kendall, and Kendall would say her side, and by the time anybody drove anywhere it would be the afternoon.

And the aids were at Chad and Kendall’s house, eleven miles out of town on a gravel road, and both of them were at work. Kendall’s bank was the other direction.