The Front Pew and the Choir

The Girl From Loyal

I put an ad in the shopper and on the bulletin board at the co-op. By Tuesday a family from out past Loyal called, the Hansens, who had a daughter in 4-H.

They came on Saturday morning in a three-quarter-ton pickup. The father was a quiet man in a seed cap. The mother had a coffee in each hand. Their girl, Abby, was thirteen and could not stand still.

Abby had a pony she had outgrown and a new horse coming, a gelding she had been saving babysitting money toward for two years. They had been borrowing a neighbor’s trailer for every show.

She walked all the way around my trailer twice. She opened the tack room and stood inside it and breathed in, the way you do when a place smells like horses and leather and dust.

“Was this yours for a long time?” she asked me.

“Twenty-two years,” I said. “My mare’s name was Penny. She was a sorrel. She liked peppermints, and she hated rain on the roof.”

Abby nodded like that was important information, and I loved her for it. “I’ll remember,” she said. “I’ll put peppermints in the tack room.”

Her father looked over the hitch and the tires and the floor. He checked the lights with Dan. Then he offered five thousand, and I said yes before Dan could negotiate.

Abby cried. She was so happy she cried and then was embarrassed about it, and her mother put an arm around her and said, “Well, now you’ve done it, you’ve got me going too.”

Dan hitched it to their truck himself. I went into the house before they pulled out because I could not watch it go down the lane.

I stood at the kitchen sink and listened to the tires on the gravel until I could not hear them. Then I washed a coffee cup that was already clean.

Dan came in after a while and set the check on the counter beside me. “That girl’s going to take good care of it,” he said. “She already asked me how often to grease the bearings.”

The Fitting

I called Dr. Larsen’s office Monday and paid for the hearing aids in full, from my own account, with the Hansens’ check. The receptionist asked if I wanted a payment plan. I said no, thank you.

I did not tell Dad where the money came from. I told him I had taken care of it, and that he was going to have to come to town in two weeks to get them fitted.

“You won’t hear one word,” he said. “I won’t hear it either.” Then he laughed at his own joke, on time for once, and I laughed with him.

The fitting was on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of September. I took a personal day from school.

Dad wore his good flannel shirt and combed his hair with water like he was going to the bank. He sat in the chair in Dr. Larsen’s back room with his hands folded on his knees.

The hearing aids were small, a soft tan color, tucked behind each ear with a thin clear wire curving down.

“It’s going to sound loud at first,” she said. “Everything will. Your brain has forgotten what a lot of sounds are. Give it time.”

She turned them on.

Dad flinched. His whole body jumped a little in the chair, like someone had dropped a pan behind him. He lifted his arm and looked at the sleeve of his flannel shirt.

“That’s me,” he said. “That’s my sleeve. That sounds like sandpaper.”

Then he heard his own voice, and his eyes went wide. “Is that what I sound like? I sound like a tractor in a culvert.”

Dr. Larsen laughed. And he heard her laugh, I could see that he heard it, because he turned his whole head toward the sound instead of watching her mouth.

Then he went still and looked up at the wall. There was a plain round clock up there, black hands and a white face, the kind every school in Wisconsin has had since 1960.

“Has that thing always ticked?” he said.

I had to get up and go stand in the hallway for a minute. I stood next to a rack of pamphlets and cried into the sleeve of my jacket, quiet, so he would not hear.

He would have heard. That was the thing. For the first time in two years he would have heard me crying in the next room.

When I came back in, he was listening to Dr. Larsen tap a pen on her desk, tilting his head one way and then the other like a dog hearing a truck in the yard.

“Teresa,” he said. “Say something.”

“Hi, Dad.”

He closed his eyes. “Say it again.”

“Hi, Dad. I love you.”

He did not open his eyes for a while. He nodded, the way he had nodded at everything for two years, only this time he had heard what he was nodding to.