At the far end of the table, Grandma Fern was smiling at all of us and nodding along. She was eighty-six years old and wearing the pearl clip-on earrings she wears every single Easter.
She had not heard one word of it. Not the eighteen thousand, not the brisket, not the word practical. She just smiled down the table at her family, glad we were all there.
Grandma Fern is my dad’s mother. She lived forty years on a farm north of Hartshorne, raising four kids, a garden the size of a church parking lot and a few head of Angus my grandpa would not sell even when he should have.
When I was a girl, she sang alto in the choir at First Baptist and could hear a screen door slap from the back forty.
By eighty-six she had quit the choir. She told everybody it was her knees, but it was not her knees.
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She could not hear the piano well enough to find her note, and she would rather quit than sing flat in front of God and the whole congregation.
She quit answering the telephone. She sat through Brother Tim’s sermons every Sunday with her Bible open in her lap, reading along with her finger, because the sermon itself was just a warm murmur at the front of the room.
The worst part was the children. My cousin’s kids would run up to her with a drawing or a frog or a loose tooth, and she would smile and say, “Well, that’s nice, honey.” She said that to everything. A frog was nice. A broken arm was nice.
Nate and I drove home from Easter dinner in his truck, a white Silverado with the co-op sticker on the back glass and a hard hat on the floorboard that I had to put my feet around.
“We’ve got fifty-six hundred saved,” he said. “For the reception. The Legion hall and the food and that deejay your friend from work knows.”
“We don’t need the Legion hall, Morgan,” he said, and then he went quiet again and let that sit in the cab between us.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.
“Then say it out loud,” he said. “You’ll like it better once it’s out of your head.”
Grandma Fern needed to hear. I had fifty-six hundred dollars in an account with my name on it. And I did not need anybody’s permission or anybody’s money to marry the man beside me in front of a judge.
Nate reached across the cab and took my hand. “Your grandma’s going to fight you on it,” he said. “You know that, right?”
I am a vet tech at a large animal clinic outside McAlester. I spend most days with cattle and horses and the occasional goat that has eaten something it should not have.
On Monday, on my lunch break, I sat in my car in the clinic lot with a sandwich and called an audiologist’s office on the north side of McAlester.
The woman on the phone was kind. She explained that a full hearing test came first, then a fitting appointment, then follow-up visits to adjust them.
She said a good pair for real loss usually ran somewhere between four and six thousand dollars.
“Does Medicare pay any of it?” I asked, though I was fairly sure I already knew the answer from helping Grandma with her mail.
“Regular Medicare doesn’t cover hearing aids, hon,” she said. “Some of the Advantage plans give a little allowance. We can check her card when she comes in, if you want.”