The Cruise Money Bought My Dad’s Hearing

I don’t think she meant to hurt him. I believed that even on the dock. I think she meant to make him one of them, in the only way she knew how.

But she did hurt him, and then she laughed about it, and then she told him it was his own fault.

Around nine that night, we gave up on the pond. Josh came out of the water shivering in his wet jeans, with mud to his knees, and sat on the grass beside my dad’s chair.

He put his hand on Dad’s knee and held it there.

Dad looked at him and nodded once. Josh nodded back. That’s how the men in my life talk, mostly.

Cindy had gone home an hour before. Somebody said she had a headache.

She did not come say anything to my father on her way to her car. I noticed that, and I think Dad noticed it too.

I drove Dad home to his place outside Ava myself, with Josh following in his truck so Dad’s pickup wouldn’t have to sit at Dale’s overnight.

Dad rode with the beach towel still around his neck. I talked to him twice, out of habit, and then remembered and stopped.

At his house, I walked him to the door and wrote on the back of an envelope with a pen from my purse.

I’ll be here at 8 in the morning. Do not drive anywhere. Love you.

He read it under the porch light and smiled at me for the first time since the splash. “Bossy,” he said, too loud. “Just like your mother.” Then he went inside.

Sunday was the hardest day. He didn’t go to church, because what was the point.

I went over with a legal pad and a pack of pens, and we sat out on his back porch steps and passed the pad back and forth like two kids in study hall.

He wrote slow, in that square lineman’s printing of his. Feels like I’m underwater still. Then, a minute later, he wrote, Embarrassed me more than anything. All those people.

I wrote back, You didn’t do one thing wrong.

He read it and folded the pad over and set it on the step. He looked out at his bird feeders, the ones Mom hung, and a cardinal landed right there and sang.

I could tell he was watching its beak open and close. I had to get up and go fill his water pitcher.

That evening I sat with Josh on our own back steps in town. The sun was going down behind the water tower, and the neighbor’s sprinkler was ticking over the fence.

“I’ve been thinking about the cruise money,” I said.

Josh didn’t say anything right away. He had been thinking about it too. I could tell, because he had been unusually quiet all through supper and kept rubbing the back of his neck.

Here is what you need to know about the cruise money.

Cindy turns sixty next spring. Back in the fall before last, Josh and I had decided to give her something big for it.

She had never been on a vacation that wasn’t a church bus or a camping trip. She had always wanted to see the ocean.

So we had put back $250 a month for eighteen months, in a separate savings account at the credit union with nothing else in it.

It added up to $4,500, enough for a cabin for Cindy and her sister on a five-day cruise out of Galveston, with a little spending money.

We had told her at Christmas. She cried. She hugged us both so hard I felt my back pop.