The Cruise Money Bought My Dad’s Hearing

“Don’t make trouble with her on my account, sis,” he said. He has called me sis since I was two.

People three lawn chairs over turned and looked. “You hear me? It was a dumb thing. Let it go.”

I nodded so he could see me nod. I took his hand and held it, and the back of it was still cold from the pond water even in that heat.

I want to tell you a little about my father, so you understand what was at the bottom of that pond.

My mother died five years ago this past March. It was her heart, quick, on an ordinary Tuesday.

For a long time before that, she had been after Dad to get his hearing checked.

Thirty-eight years around boom trucks and chainsaws and transformers that go off like a cannon when they blow will take a man’s ears.

By the end, Mom was repeating everything twice and Dad was turning the television up until the neighbors could follow along.

He wouldn’t spend the money. He said hearing aids were for old men. He said he heard fine.

He said a lot of things, and Mom let him say them, and then she died, and the house got very quiet.

About a year after the funeral, he called me on a Sunday afternoon.

He said, “Kayla, I can’t hear the preacher anymore. I sit in that pew and I don’t get a word of it. And I can’t hear the birds out back. Your mother always fed the birds.”

So we went. He paid for them himself, $4,100 out of his savings, which is a lot of money for a retired lineman on a co-op pension and Social Security.

He grumbled about the price for a month and then never took them out again.

He bought the three-year loss and damage plan with them, because I told him to. That was three and a half years ago.

The plan had run out that spring. And regular Medicare doesn’t pay one dime toward hearing aids. I checked again that night anyway, sitting in my car.

Now, I want to be fair to Cindy, too, because I have learned some things since.

Cindy grew up the only girl with four older brothers on a dairy farm outside Seymour.

To hear her tell it, those boys threw her in the stock pond every summer of her life.

She learned to laugh first and loudest, because the alternative was crying, and crying didn’t get you anywhere in that family.

She is the life of every party she goes to. She is the one who puts shaving cream on the groom’s truck and fake spiders in the bridal shower punch.

Most of the family loves her for it. Some of them just put up with it.

Josh’s dad, Dwight, died of a stroke when Josh was nineteen. Cindy has kept up that four-acre place south of Ava by herself ever since, and she has never once asked anybody for help.

And she had never known what to do with my dad. He is quiet. He does not do the hokey pokey at weddings.

He sits off to the side and watches, and Cindy took that to mean he was looking down his nose at the rest of them. She called him “the Professor,” and not kindly.

He was never looking down at anybody. He was just a man who couldn’t follow a conversation in a crowd, sitting where he could at least see people’s faces.