The Cruise Money Bought My Dad’s Hearing

And since then, she had told every woman at the beauty shop and everyone in her Sunday school class and the girl at the Dollar General checkout.

“She’ll never forgive us,” Josh said finally.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I can’t sit at his house passing notes on a legal pad for a month while I save up another four thousand dollars. He can’t hear the phone. He can’t hear a smoke alarm, Josh. He lives alone.”

“I’m not asking her to pay for anything,” I said. “I don’t want to fight her. I don’t want to take her to small claims or have Dale’s family picking sides at Thanksgiving. I just want to fix it. And the money is ours. It was a gift we hadn’t given yet.”

Somebody might ask why I didn’t just call the sheriff, or send Cindy a bill. Nobody calls the sheriff over a family reunion.

And she was Josh’s mother. If we made her pay, it would be a war that lasted ten years. If we just fixed it, it was fixed.

Josh looked out at the yard for a long time. A lightning bug came up out of the grass, and then another one.

“It was ours to give,” he said. “Do it, Kayla.”

I let my breath out. I hadn’t known I was holding it.

“And Kayla,” he said. “When the time comes, I’ll tell Mom myself. That’s mine to do. Not yours.”

I put my head on his shoulder. He smelled like pond water and hickory smoke still, even after a shower.

I married a good man. I knew that before, but I knew it all the way, right then on those steps.

Monday morning I called the dental office at seven and told Dr. Pruitt I needed a personal day.

He said, “Is your dad okay?” because in a town that size, news from Saturday had already traveled. I said, “He will be.”

I picked Dad up at eight. He was sitting on his porch steps in a clean shirt with his hair combed wet, waiting, like it was the first day of school.

It was about an hour and ten minutes to Springfield, up Highway 5 and over to 60.

The audiologist’s office was the same one we’d gone to before, a low brick building with a little parking lot shaded by a row of big pin oaks.

Dr. Hensley remembered him. She came out to the waiting room herself.

I had called ahead on Saturday night and left a message, and she had called me back first thing.

Because Dad had a full hearing test there in February, she said, she could order the same model again on Monday and fit him by Thursday.

Inside, the new pair came to $4,300, with the fitting, the follow-up visits, a charger, and a new three-year loss and damage plan.

I had the debit card for the cruise account in my wallet. I had moved it there Sunday night so I wouldn’t lose my nerve.

Dad found out what I was doing at the front desk. He can read numbers fine.

He read the screen, and then he read my face, and his whole jaw set the way it used to when I was sixteen and wanted to take the truck to Branson.

“No, ma’am,” he said, too loud for that little waiting room. “That’s your money. I’ll put them on a payment plan.”