The Forty Miles to Speech Therapy

Becca didn’t cry. That was the worst part. She just went very still, and then she said, “There’s a mix-up. There has to be. He takes her. He leaves early on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’ve seen him.”

“Have you ever seen her come home from it?”

She opened her mouth and closed it again. She works until three at the home, and three of those nights she goes straight to the Casey’s until eleven.

She had not seen much of anything in two years except a time clock.

“Mom,” she said, and her voice went thin. “Please. Please don’t call anybody. Don’t call the sheriff and don’t go over there and don’t make this a whole thing. We are barely holding on. If this blows up, I don’t know what happens to us. I don’t know what happens to Ava.”

People have asked me since why I didn’t go straight to the sheriff, or march over there and have it out with him on his front porch.

The answer is that it was family money, handed over in an envelope on trust, with nothing written down.

And my daughter, who I love more than my own life, was sitting on a curb by a dumpster begging me not to.

The thing that mattered was that a little girl had gone two years without the help she needed, and she was six now, and the woman who tested her had said the earlier the better.

“All right,” I told Becca. “I won’t call anybody. But I need one thing from you.”

“What?”

“I’m going to call that clinic and get her in myself. I’ll take her. They’re going to need your signature on the papers.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded, and she put her head on my shoulder for about four seconds, and then her break was over and she went back inside.

I called the clinic in Chillicothe from my kitchen phone, the wall one Dale put in when we were first married. A woman named Donna answered. She had a voice like somebody’s favorite aunt.

“I’d like to get my granddaughter in to see Miss Jill,” I said. “She’s six. She stutters.”

“Jill’s our fluency specialist,” Donna said. “She’s wonderful. Has your granddaughter been seen here before?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and it cost me something to say it. “I was told she had. I don’t believe it now.”

Donna didn’t ask me anything else about that, and I was grateful. She said Jill had an opening on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:15, from a family that had just moved to Kansas City.

She said a parent or guardian had to come to the first visit to sign the intake forms and show the insurance card.

“Her mother will be there,” I said. “I’ll be bringing her after that.”

Then I sat down with a pencil and a bus schedule, because I had a route to drive. My morning route ends at 8:15. My afternoon route starts at the bus barn at 2:30. Everything in between is mine.

If I signed Ava out of school at 10:30, we’d be in Chillicothe by 11:10. Forty-five minutes with Miss Jill.

Lunch in the van on the way back. Ava back in her classroom by 1:15, and me at the bus barn with time to spare.

Becca came to the first appointment straight off a Casey’s night and a few hours of sleep.

She sat in the clinic waiting room with Ava on her lap and a clipboard on Ava’s knees, and Ava helped her hold the pen.