The Cruise Money Bought My Dad’s Hearing

I took out the legal pad from my purse and wrote it right there at the counter. You paid for my braces with money you didn’t have. Let me do this.

He read it. He stood there a long time. The lady at the desk looked down at her keyboard and pretended to be busy, which I have always thought was a kindness.

Then he said, quieter, “What about the trip for Josh’s mom?”

I wrote, It’s family money. You’re family. Then I handed the card over before he could start again.

Out in the parking lot he walked to the car and stood by the passenger door and didn’t get in. “That’s still your money, Kayla,” he said, too loud. I held the legal pad up again so he could read it.

He put his hand flat on the warm roof of the car for a minute.

“Your mother would have killed me for arguing with you in there,” he said. “She’d have said, Leon, let the girl love you.”

That was Monday. I don’t think either one of us said another word the whole way home, but it was a different quiet than Saturday’s.

Thursday morning we went back. Dr. Hensley took him back to fit the new pair and run them through her computer, and I sat in the waiting room with a magazine I didn’t read, listening to the receptionist answer the phone.

He was in there forty-five minutes. When he came out, he was walking a little careful, the way you walk when you have new glasses on and the floor looks closer than it should.

“Kayla,” he said. Just my name, in a normal voice. Not loud. He heard himself say it and stopped, and his eyebrows went up.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, and he heard that too. I watched it land on him.

We went out through the glass door into the parking lot. It was about ten in the morning and already warm, and those pin oaks along the edge of the lot were full of noise.

Halfway to the car, Dad stopped under the trees.

He tilted his head, the way a dog does when it hears its name from another room.

I stopped too. I didn’t know what he was listening to at first. Then I heard it.

“Kayla,” he said. “What kind of bird is that?”

It was a mockingbird, high up in the biggest oak, going through every song it had stolen.

A cardinal, then a blue jay, then something like a car alarm, then a robin, around and around without ever taking a breath.

“That’s a mockingbird, Dad,” I said. “It’s doing all the other birds. It’s just showing off.”

He stood there under that tree listening like it was the very first bird God ever made.

His mouth was a little bit open. A car pulled in two spaces down, and he didn’t even look at it.

“Your mother would have known that before I asked,” he said. His voice was rough.

“She knew every one of them. She’d sit out back with her coffee and tell me, that’s a wren, Leon, that’s a titmouse. And I’d say, I don’t hear a thing, Marlys. And she’d just shake her head at me.”

Marlys was my mother’s name. He doesn’t say it much.

“I wish I’d gone and got these years before I did,” he said. “I wish I’d heard her tell me about the birds.”

I had to look down at the pavement for a minute. I looked at the white lines and the oil stains and a little pile of acorn caps from last fall, and I waited until I could see straight again.