The Forty Miles to Speech Therapy

The waiting room had a toy box. A big wooden one, painted like a barn.

Ava saw it and slid off Becca’s lap and stood in front of it like it was Christmas morning, and I had to look at the ceiling for a while.

Donna took the clipboard and Becca’s insurance card back to her desk. She typed for a minute. Then she stopped typing, and she frowned at her screen, and she typed again.

“Mrs. Tolliver,” she said, and she said it gently, “could you come here a minute, hon?”

Becca went to the desk. I went with her. Donna turned her screen a little toward us, the way you’d turn a hymnal toward somebody who forgot theirs.

“This coverage shows terminated,” Donna said. “Last May. The policy through the co-op ended May thirty-first of last year.”

Becca read it. She read it again. I watched her lips move.

“That can’t be right,” she said. “Shane’s at the mill every day. He’s there right now.”

Donna didn’t say anything to that. She scrolled down. “There’s something else here you ought to know about, and I don’t know if you do. We have a referral for Ava from two years ago. She was put on our waitlist. When a spot opened that October, we called the number on file four times. Nobody ever called us back, and after sixty days she came off the list.”

“What number?” Becca said, and Donna read it out. It was Shane’s cell.

My daughter put both hands flat on that desk, like the floor had tipped. Then she straightened up and took the clipboard back and finished filling out the form. Her hand shook so bad her signature looked like somebody else’s.

Donna was the one who told us about the state’s health insurance for children.

She said a lot of farm families didn’t know they qualified, and that it covered speech therapy, and that she helped families fill out the application at her desk all the time.

“I’ll pay until it comes through,” I said. Becca started to argue, and I put my hand on her arm. “I was paying already, honey. I was just paying the wrong man.”

Self-pay was a hundred and ten dollars a session. Twice a week. I wrote the first check that day, for two sessions, out of the account where my survivor check goes. My hand did not shake at all.

Becca sat at Donna’s desk for forty minutes after that with her phone and her pay stubs. She was quiet the whole time.

When she was done, she came and sat beside me while Ava was in with Miss Jill, and she held my hand like she did when she was small and we sat in the dentist’s office.

“He leaves at quarter after six every morning,” she said finally. “Every morning, Mom. In his work boots. With his lunch.”

“I know, honey.”

“Where does he go?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and at that time, it was the truth.

Miss Jill was younger than I expected, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a soft way of sitting on the floor so she was the same height as Ava.

Her room had a rug with roads printed on it and a basket of little wooden trucks.

She let me sit in the corner for the first session. Mostly she and Ava just played with the trucks, and Miss Jill talked very slowly, and every so often she’d say a word long and stretched out, like taffy. “Thiiis truck goes up the hiiill.”