The Cruise Money Bought My Dad’s Hearing

“I think you two had better go,” she said.

So we went. Josh walked to the truck without looking back, but I saw him look in the side mirror as we pulled out.

She was still standing in the yard where we had left her, with her gloves in her hand.

Now, a family that size doesn’t keep anything quiet for long.

Cindy told her side of it to some people, the way anybody would.

But forty people had stood on that bank and watched a 68-year-old man come up out of the water feeling for his ears. Her side didn’t travel very far.

She didn’t come to the Fourth of July fish fry at Dale’s. It was the first one she had missed since Josh was born.

Some of the cousins said she had a stomach bug. Everybody knew she didn’t.

Josh called her every Sunday evening anyway, the way he always had. Some weeks she picked up and talked about her tomatoes and the weather and nothing else.

Some weeks she didn’t pick up. He kept calling. That’s the kind of son he is.

Meanwhile my dad was having the time of his life.

He went back to church and sat in his old spot, third pew on the left, and came out shaking the preacher’s hand and telling him he’d been wrong about something in Second Kings.

The preacher was so glad to be argued with, he invited him to Wednesday night Bible study.

He filled all of Mom’s bird feeders, the ones that had been sitting half empty out back for five years.

He bought a bird book at the farm store in Ava and a pair of cheap binoculars, and he started keeping a list on the inside cover of the book.

The third week of July was hot and still, the kind of Ozark July where the air feels like a wet towel by ten in the morning.

I went out to Dad’s place on a Saturday to help him pick green beans before the heat got bad.

We were out in his garden in the side yard, both of us in old straw hats, bent over the bean rows with five-gallon buckets.

His radio was on low on the porch rail, playing the Saturday morning swap show out of West Plains, and he was laughing at the callers.

That’s when we heard tires on the gravel. Dad heard them first. I want you to understand what that meant to me, that he heard them first.

He straightened up with one hand on the small of his back. “Somebody’s coming,” he said.

It was Cindy’s silver car, coming slow up his long drive with the dust rolling out behind it.

She parked out by the mailbox, farther away than she needed to, and sat in the car for a minute with the engine off.

Then she got out and walked up through the yard to the garden fence.

She was wearing a plain blouse and slacks, no jewelry to speak of, and she had her purse on her shoulder and an envelope in her hand.

I set my bucket down. I’ll be honest, my heart was going. I didn’t know what she had come to say, and I wasn’t sure I had anything left to say back.

But she wasn’t there to talk to me. She looked at me and nodded once, a small nod, and then she looked at my father across the bean rows.

“Leon,” she said. Normal voice. Not loud, not cheerful. Just a woman saying a man’s name in a garden. “Can you hear me all right?”