Cindy’s hands landed flat between my father’s shoulder blades.
I saw it happen from six feet away. I was holding a paper plate of potato salad. Dad was standing at the end of the old wooden dock, looking out over the farm pond the way he looks at everything, quiet and patient, his good straw hat pushed back on his head.
Cindy came up behind him laughing and shoved.
Dad went in with a heavy, flat splash that sent brown water up over the dock boards. His hat landed upside down on the surface and turned in a slow circle.
He came up sputtering, waist-deep beside the dock. His light blue button-up shirt was soaked to the chest. The water came up past his belt buckle.
His hand went to his left ear. Then his right.
Nothing there.
Forty people at the reunion went quiet at once. Somebody’s radio kept playing an old George Strait song up by the barn. A kid on the tire swing stopped swinging.
Cindy stood on the dock behind me with her paper plate in one hand. She was smiling.
“Oh, Leon, lighten up,” she said. “You should’ve taken them out.”
He couldn’t hear a word she said.
I dropped my plate. Potato salad went across the dock boards. I got down on my knees in my yellow sundress and reached for my father’s hand.
“Daddy. Give me your hand.”
He looked up at me. His face was white under his tan, and his eyes were scared, really scared, in a way I’d never seen them. His mouth moved, but he was talking too loud, the way he does when he can’t hear himself.
“Kayla? Kayla, I can’t hear. They’re gone. Both of ’em.”
My father is sixty-eight years old. He climbed utility poles for the Ozark Rural Electric Cooperative for thirty-eight years, through ice storms and tornadoes and hundred-degree Augusts. When the big ice storm of 2007 took down half the lines in southwest Missouri, he worked nineteen days straight and slept in his truck.
He doesn’t fall in ponds.
I got both hands around his wrist and pulled. He found his footing in the mud and climbed out onto the bank, water pouring off him, his boots squelching. He stood there dripping, patting his ears over and over, like the hearing aids might come back if he just checked one more time.
My name is Kayla Brandt. I’m thirty-four, and I work as the billing coordinator at a dental office in Ozark, Missouri. I spend my days on the phone with insurance companies, explaining why a crown isn’t cosmetic and why a deep cleaning really is necessary. I know exactly what things cost. I know which insurance pays for what, and I know which ones pay for nothing at all.
And I know exactly what pond water does to anything with a battery in it.
