The Hearing Aids I Brought to Recess

When he stood up, he turned to Mrs. Lund first. “Thank you for calling me,” he said. “I mean it.”

“She’s a good girl,” Mrs. Lund said. “She works harder than any child in my room. She deserves to hear what she’s working for.”

Then Chad turned to me. “You should have called me, Mandy,” he said quietly. Nobody else has called me Mandy in four years.

“Would it have gone well?” I asked. I didn’t say it mean. I meant it as a real question.

He thought about that honestly. “No,” he said. “Probably not. I’d have defended her before I listened. That’s on me.”

He put his cap back on. “I’m going home to get them. They’ll be at your house before supper.”

“Chad,” I said. “Kendall.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll talk to her. She’s coming with me.”

Emma went back in to eat her lunch, chattering at Mrs. Lund about the bell.

I went back to work for the afternoon, because the bills don’t stop, and I checked my phone about every four minutes.

At 4:40, a little after Emma and I got home, Chad’s pickup pulled into my driveway. I watched from the kitchen window.

Chad got out of the driver’s side. Then, after a long moment, the passenger door opened, and Kendall got out too.

She was still in her bank clothes. Her eyes were red, and she was holding Emma’s purple hearing aids in both hands, cupped together, the same careful way Emma had held the loaner at recess.

I went out onto the porch. Emma came out behind me and stood holding on to the back of my shirt.

Kendall walked up to the bottom of the porch steps and stopped there. She didn’t come up.

I think she knew she hadn’t been invited, and she was right. She looked at me, and then she looked down at Emma.

“Emma,” she said, “can I talk to you? Your mom can stay right there.”

Emma looked up at me. I nodded. She came down two steps, so she was eye to eye with Kendall.

“I took something from you that I had no business taking,” Kendall said. Her voice shook.

She took a breath. “When I was your age and I talked back, my dad took away my clarinet. It was the thing I loved most, and he locked it in his truck for a month. I hated it. But I thought that was how you teach a kid. You take the thing she loves.”

She swallowed.

“I didn’t understand that your hearing aids aren’t a toy, or a treat. I thought you could hear fine if you tried. Your dad told me today what Mrs. Lund said, about the spelling test and standing by the slide.”

She stopped and pressed her lips together. “I’m so sorry, Emma. I was wrong. I’m not going to ever do it again.”

Emma looked at her for a long time. I have learned to wait when she does that. She is nine, but she is fair.

“Did you play the clarinet good?” Emma finally asked.

Kendall let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Not very. But I loved it.”

“I love hearing,” Emma said simply.

“I know,” Kendall said. “I know that now.”

Emma held out her hand, and Kendall put the purple hearing aids in it. Emma took off the loaners, handed them to me, and put her own back in, one and then the other.