The Forty Miles to Speech Therapy

Mrs. Harmon had me sit in one of the little blue chairs, the kind made for kindergartners, so my knees came up nearly to my chin.

She sat across from me in one just like it, with Ava’s folder open on the low table between us.

“She’s a sweetheart,” she said. “She reads above grade level. She’s kind to the shy ones. She’s the first one to help me stack chairs at the end of the day.” She turned a page and smiled down at a drawing of a cow with a purple sun over it.

I was there because Becca couldn’t be. My daughter works days as an aide at the nursing home in Brookfield and three nights a week at the Casey’s out by the highway, and parent conferences in April come at four on a Thursday afternoon, which is the start of her Casey’s shift.

So I came straight off my afternoon route still smelling like diesel and bus seats. I have driven Route 4 for the district for eleven years.

Ava rides it every morning, right behind my seat, where I can see her in the big mirror.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Mrs. Harmon said, and she closed the folder. “Becca put on the fall form that Ava gets outside speech therapy, twice a week. Our district speech teacher only comes on Wednesdays, and she’d love to see the clinic’s notes.”

“She goes to a place in Chillicothe,” I said. “Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her daddy takes her. A Miss Jill.”

“Patti,” Mrs. Harmon said, “last week we were doing a unit on community helpers. Doctors, nurses, the mailman. I asked if anybody had ever been to a speech doctor, because I thought Ava might like to share.”

“And she did?”

“She said she’d never been to one. She said her daddy told her they’d go next year. And then she asked me if a speech doctor’s office has toys in it.” Mrs. Harmon looked at her hands. “I’m sorry. I thought you should know.”

I sat in that little blue chair and I could not get my breath. Through the window I could see my bus parked by the flagpole where I’d left it, the long yellow side of it catching the sun.

Two years. Five hundred dollars on the first Sunday of every month, in a bank envelope, handed across my kitchen table to my son-in-law. Twenty-four envelopes. Twelve thousand dollars.

“Thank you,” I said, and I made myself stand up out of that chair without my knees cracking too loud. “Thank you for telling me. You did right.”

Ava started stuttering when she was three. At first it was the kind every little one does, getting stuck on “I, I, I want” when the words come faster than the mouth. But by four it had a shape to it that scared me.

She would stop on a sound and her whole face would tighten. Her eyes would squeeze shut.

Sometimes she would stamp one foot, like she could kick the word loose. Then she would just give up and point at what she wanted.

Our family doctor sent her to be tested, and the woman who tested her said it plain.

This was a real stutter, not a phase, and the earlier she got help the better her chances were. Twice a week, she said. A fluency specialist.

The nearest one was in Chillicothe. Forty miles from our town, which has about nine hundred people, two churches, a grain elevator and a Casey’s. Forty miles of blacktop and Highway 36 each way.