The next problem was getting Grandma into the car. I knew if I told her the truth up front, she would dig in her heels like a heifer at a loading chute and not budge for anybody.
So I told her a half truth. I told her I had an appointment in McAlester on Tuesday and wanted company for the drive, and we could get lunch at the catfish place on the highway afterward.
The audiologist was a woman about my mom’s age named Dr. Ellis, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a voice that carried without being loud. She came out to the waiting room to get us herself.
“You must be Fern,” she said, bending down and speaking right toward her face. “Your granddaughter tells me you used to sing alto at First Baptist.”
Grandma looked at me hard. “I’m not buying anything,” she said, loud enough that the man at the front desk looked up from his computer.
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Grandma let her run the test anyway. She sat in the little booth with the headphones on and raised her hand when she heard a beep, and I watched through the glass as she sat there for long stretches with her hand in her lap, waiting for beeps that were already playing.
Afterward Dr. Ellis showed us the chart. There was a line across the top that showed normal hearing, and then there was Grandma’s line, sloping down and down like a creek bank washing out after a flood.
“Moderately severe in both ears,” Dr. Ellis said. “Worse on the high end. That’s where the consonants live, Fern. That’s why people sound like they’re mumbling at you. It’s the S’s and the T’s and the F’s you’re missing.”
“I thought everybody had just started mumbling,” Grandma said. “I thought it was the young people. I thought they’d quit opening their mouths when they talked.”
Grandma looked down at her purse in her lap, and for a second I saw how tired she was. Three years of nodding. Three years of smiling at the wrong time. Three years of “that’s nice.”
Dr. Ellis left us alone in her office with a brochure and a price sheet.
The pair she recommended, the kind that sit behind the ear with a thin clear wire, came to five thousand five hundred and forty dollars. That covered the fitting and three years of adjustments and cleanings.
Grandma picked up the sheet and held it out at arm’s length and then laid it face down on the desk like it was a bill from the devil himself.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “I’ll get one of those cheap ones from the drugstore. They’ve got them right there by the reading glasses.”
Then she switched tactics. “Where would you get that kind of money?” she said. “You’re about to get married. You need every dime you’ve got, Morgan. Weddings cost the earth.”
So I told her. I told her about Easter, all of it. I told her about the eighteen thousand and the brisket for a hundred and fifty and my mother patting my hand.
“Douglas did that?” she said finally. “My Douglas? He sat at that table and said that to you, and I was sitting right there?”
“Dad and Mom both,” I said. “They think Bailey needs it more right now. Maybe she does. She had a hard time, Grandma. You know she did.”
“Grandma, Nate and I are getting married at the courthouse,” I said. “We decided on the way home. We had fifty-six hundred saved for a reception at the Legion hall, and I would rather spend it on you being able to hear me say I do.”