The Forty Miles to Speech Therapy
“We call that turtle talk,” she told me afterward, in the hall. “Slow and smooth. Kids who stutter usually rush. I want her to hear what slow sounds like before I ask her to do it.”
She showed me two more things to practice at home. One was easy starts, where you let a little breath out before the first sound, so it slides in instead of slamming.
The other was stretchy words, where you hold the first sound of a hard word just a hair longer.
“The worst thing is to finish words for her,” Miss Jill said. “I know it’s hard. Everybody who loves her wants to help. But when you finish it, she learns her own words aren’t worth waiting for.”
I thought about all the times I’d done exactly that, in the kitchen, at the table, on my bus. I thought I’d been helping. I nodded and told her I’d stop.
“One more thing,” she said. “Does she like music?”
“She sings with the radio every chance she gets.”
“Then let her,” Miss Jill said, smiling. “A lot of children who stutter don’t stutter at all when they sing. It uses the brain a different way. It’s good for her to feel her words come out whole. She needs to know they can.”
So Tuesdays and Thursdays I finished my morning route, went home and ate a piece of toast, and at 10:30 I signed Ava out at the front office.
The secretary, a woman named Kim who I’ve known since she was a girl, started having the sign-out sheet ready on the counter.
I drive an old silver minivan, a 2008 that Dale bought used the year Ava was born so we’d have room for a car seat.
It has two hundred and six thousand miles on it and a sliding door that sticks in cold weather. It got us there every single time.
Ava rode in her booster seat in the second row, where I could see her in the rearview mirror.
She brought a picture book every time, a different one from the school library. She’d read me the pictures while I drove, and I’d listen.
We kept the radio on the country station out of Chillicothe. When an old song came on that she knew, she’d sing every word of it, loud and clean, her light brown braid swinging. Not one catch. Not one stop.
The first time it happened, I had to pull over on the gravel shoulder past the Grand River bridge. She thought something was wrong with the van. I told her Grandma just needed to blow her nose.
After that we made a game of it. Miss Jill said singing was good, and talking slow was good, and so we’d do both.
I’d turn the radio down during the ads and Ava would practice her turtle talk to it, like the radio was a person.
“Goooood morning, raaaadio,” she’d say, stretching it out, giggling. “Thiiis is Ava.”
When we passed the Henley place, I told her what her grandpa always said, that when the cows all lie down in the field it’s fixing to rain.
She made me say it three times. She was two when Dale died, and she likes to hear what he used to say.
I bought her a yellow sweater at the Walmart in Chillicothe the third week, because the mornings were still cool and she’d outgrown her jacket.
She wore it every Tuesday and Thursday after that. She said it was her speech sweater.