The Hearing Aids I Brought to Recess

“These will sit a little looser without her molds,” she said. “She might get some whistling if they’re not seated right. Push them in gently and tell her to keep her hair tucked behind them. But she’ll hear.”

She slid the loaners into a small clear pouch and set a card of 312 batteries beside it. Then she pressed the pouch into my palm and closed my fingers around it.

“No charge for loaners,” she said. “Keep them as long as you need them. And Amanda?”

“Yes?”

“You did right, driving down here,” she said. “A day matters at her age. Every day of words matters.”

Deb walked me back out to the lot. At the door she said, “You tell that girl Deb said hi, and that she still owes me a Minnesota plate.”

It was 10:10 when I got back on the interstate. I did the speed limit, maybe a hair over.

The pouch sat on the passenger seat where I could see it, and every few miles I reached over and touched it to make sure it was still there, the way you check on a sleeping baby.

I called the school office from a gas station at the edge of town. The secretary told me Mrs. Lund’s class would be out for late-morning recess until 11:30. That’s the one the third graders get before lunch, and Mrs. Lund had playground duty that week.

I pulled into the school lot at 11:15. It’s a one-story brick building, the same school Chad and I both went to, with the gym at one end and the playground out back by the ball field.

The flag was snapping in the wind. You could hear kids shrieking all the way from the parking lot.

Mrs. Lund met me at the side door before I could even buzz in. She is in her fifties and has taught third grade in our town for almost thirty years.

She had her graying brown hair pulled back and was wearing her green cardigan, the same one she wears every spring.

“Thank goodness,” she said. “Come on. She’s out back.”

She didn’t ask what I was carrying. She walked me down the hall past the art room and the lost and found, pushed open the back door, and we stepped out into the spring daylight.

The grass along the edge of the playground had finally turned green after a long brown April. The blacktop was warm and the four-square lines were faded.

Kids were swarming the climbing set and the red slide, and a few boys were arguing over a kickball out on the grass.

Emma was standing by the bottom of the red slide in her purple jacket, all by herself.

She wasn’t playing. She wasn’t even trying to. She was standing still with her back to the slide, watching the other kids’ faces, turning her head from one to the next, trying to catch what they said by reading their mouths. Her brown braid hung down over her shoulder.

She had something clutched in both hands against her chest. It took me a second to see what it was.

It was her own little tan hearing aid case, the one that sits on her nightstand at her dad’s house.

It was empty. She had carried an empty case to school and held on to it all morning long.