The Cruise Money Bought My Dad’s Hearing

He stood on the dock dripping. Somebody behind me said, “Get him a towel,” and somebody else ran for one.

Cindy was still standing there with her plate, wearing a little half-smile, like she was waiting for the rest of us to catch up to the joke.

I did not look at her. I want to be honest about that. I did not trust what my face would do, so I did not let it point at her at all.

I worked as a dental assistant for eight years before that day, and I know one thing very well.

Water and anything with a battery in it do not get along. I knew those hearing aids were gone the second they went under.

My husband, Josh, had been up the hill with his uncle Dale, standing over the smoker in a cloud of hickory smoke, minding the brisket like it was a newborn.

He had missed the whole thing. He came down the hill at a run when he heard the hollering.

Josh is thirty-two and runs a road crew for the county, the gravel roads mostly, grading and culverts and hauling rock.

He is not a loud man. He took one look at my dad dripping on the dock and then one look at his mother.

“Mom,” he said. “What did you do?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, it was a joke,” Cindy said. She set her plate down on the post at the end of the dock.

“We used to throw each other in this pond every Fourth of July. He’ll dry out. It’s ninety degrees.”

“His hearing aids,” I said. It was the first thing I had said to her. My voice came out flat and quiet, which surprised me. “They were in his ears.”

Something crossed her face then, just for a second. Then it went away. “Well,” she said, “he should’ve taken them out.”

Josh didn’t argue with her. He kicked off his boots, pulled off his cap and his phone and his wallet, handed all of it to me, and walked right off the end of the dock into the water in his jeans.

His cousin Matt went in after him, and then one of the younger cousins, a boy of about fifteen.

The three of them spread out in a line and started walking the pond bottom slow, feeling for anything hard with their bare feet.

They walked it for two and a half hours. They walked it until the light went orange and then gray over the pasture and the whip-poor-wills started up in the woods along the creek. Matt brought a flashlight down at the end.

They found a fishing lure, a pop can older than me, and one of the little girls’ plastic sandals.

They did not find the hearing aids. In that mud, I don’t think a diver with a metal detector would have found them.

I sat on the bank with my dad the whole time. Somebody had wrapped a beach towel around his shoulders, one of those big striped ones, and he sat on a lawn chair with his wet boots in the grass and did not say much.

When he did talk, he talked too loud, the way people do when they cannot hear themselves. I hated that more than anything.

My dad has always been a quiet man, and now he was loud without meaning to be, in front of everybody.