“The bride doesn’t give the presents,” she said, and her chin was shaking. “That’s backwards. That’s all backwards, Morgan. I’m supposed to be giving you something.”
“Then it’s backwards,” I said. “I want you to hear the vows. I want you to hear Brother Tim again. I want you to hear Nate’s voice, because you’ve never once heard it right, and he’s got a nice voice.”
She put her hand over her mouth. Her rings were loose on her fingers. She was quiet so long that I thought I had lost.
“Well,” she said. “I suppose I would like to hear what that boy sounds like before I die.”
The hearing aids took two weeks to come in. I paid for them out of the reception money and told nobody except Nate. Not my parents, not Bailey, not the girls at work.
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The day of the fitting, Dr. Ellis sat Grandma down on the padded exam table with the white paper on it.
She fit the little pieces behind her ears, ran the thin clear wires down into them, and plugged a cord into her computer.
“Now, Fern,” she said, “this is going to be loud at first. The world’s been quiet for a long time. Your brain has to get used to all of it again. Give it a few weeks before you decide you hate me.”
Grandma shifted her weight, and the paper on the exam table crinkled under her. She jumped like somebody had snapped a flag in a high wind. Her hand went straight up to her ear and stayed there.
“Is that what paper sounds like?” she whispered, and she looked at me like I might know, like I might have been keeping it from her.
Then she heard her own whisper, and her eyes went big. “Oh, my goodness. Is that me? Do I sound like that? I sound like my mother.”
Grandma started laughing and could not stop. She laughed at the paper. She laughed at the air conditioner kicking on. She laughed at a car going by with its blinker on.
“That’s the turn signal,” she said. “I haven’t heard a turn signal since your grandpa’s Buick. He never once turned the thing off. Drove me crazy for thirty years.”
On the drive home she made me turn off the radio so she could listen to the tires on the road.
Halfway home she asked me to pull over onto the shoulder, and I thought something was wrong with her heart.
Nothing was wrong. There was a meadowlark on a fence post singing its head off, and she sat there in my front seat with the window rolled down and listened to it until it flew away over the pasture.
“I forgot about them,” she said, and her voice was very small. “I forgot they sounded like that. Fifty years I heard them every morning, and then I just forgot.”
Nate and I picked a Friday in April for the courthouse. Nate traded a shift with another lineman.
I took the day off from the clinic and told my boss why, and she sent me home the day before with a bucket of grocery store daisies and a card signed by every tech and both vets.
I called Mom the Sunday before. “We’re getting married Friday at ten,” I said. “At the county courthouse in McAlester. We’d love for you and Dad to be there. It’ll just be us and Grandma Fern and Nate’s folks.”