The Cruise Money Bought My Dad’s Hearing

“I can hear you fine, Cindy,” Dad said. “Better than I have in a while.”

She swallowed. She had the envelope in both hands now, bending it a little.

“Then I want to say this while you can hear it,” she said.

“I’m sorry I pushed you in that pond. I’m sorry I laughed. And I’m sorry I told you it was your own fault. It wasn’t. It was mine.”

Nobody said anything. A grasshopper ticked against the fence wire. Out by the barn, a mourning dove was calling, low and slow, and I watched Dad’s head turn just slightly toward it before he turned back to her.

“I grew up with four brothers,” Cindy said. “They threw me in every pond in Webster County. I always thought that was how you told somebody they belonged. You throw them in, and they come up laughing, and then they’re one of you.”

“I see,” Dad said.

“And I thought you were stuck up,” she said. Her face went red, but she kept going.

“I thought you sat off to the side because you thought you were better than us. I called you the Professor. I’m ashamed of that now. I didn’t know you just couldn’t hear us.”

Dad was quiet for a long moment. He took off his straw hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and put the hat back on.

“I couldn’t,” he said. “Not in a crowd. Not for years. I’d sit where I could see faces. It’s easier to guess what people are saying if you can see their faces.”

Cindy nodded. Her eyes were wet. “I went and looked it up after Josh came out,” she said.

“What they cost. I called the place in Springfield and asked. I didn’t believe him at first. I thought he was just mad.”

She held out the envelope across the fence.

“That’s half,” she said. “Twenty-one hundred and fifty dollars. It’s not much against what it cost these kids, but it’s what I had in the account I was keeping for spending money on that boat. I’d like you to take it.”

Dad didn’t reach for it right away. He looked at the envelope, and then he looked at me, and I gave him the smallest shrug I could.

It was his to decide. It had always been his.

“I’ll take it,” he said finally. “Not because I’m sore. Because you came all the way out here to say it, and I think you’d feel worse if I didn’t.”

He walked over to the fence between the bean rows and took the envelope out of her hand, and put it in the front pocket of his work shirt without opening it.

“I’ll tell you what I minded, Cindy,” he said. “It wasn’t the water. I climbed poles for thirty-eight years. I’ve been wet and cold and hung upside down in an ice storm. A farm pond in June doesn’t scare me.”

He tapped the side of his head, right behind his ear, where the new one sat.

“It was coming up and seeing everybody laughing, and not being able to hear what the joke was,” he said.

“That’s a lonely thing. Standing in the middle of your own family and not knowing what they’re laughing at.”

Cindy put her hand over her mouth. She stood there at that garden fence and cried, not loud, just the way women her age cry when they are trying very hard not to.