The water was murky and brown, about five feet deep at the end of the dock. Somebody brought a rake from the barn. Uncle Gene brought a big flashlight when the sun started going down.
They found a fishing lure, a beer can from probably 1985, and a kid’s flip-flop.
Not the hearing aids.
While they searched, I sat with Dad on a hay bale by the barn. Josh’s Aunt Peggy brought him a dry flannel shirt and a towel, and he changed behind the barn and came back with his wet shirt folded neatly over his arm, because that’s my father. Even in the worst moment, he folds his shirt.
He sat beside me and stared at the pond.
I knew those hearing aids. Dad had bought them three and a half years earlier at an audiology clinic in Springfield. They were good ones, rechargeable, with Bluetooth so he could hear phone calls right in his ears. He’d paid $4,100 for the pair, out of his savings, in cash.
I’d gone with him that day. I’d read the paperwork, because I read everyone’s paperwork. The price included a three-year loss and damage warranty: if they were lost, stolen, or damaged, the manufacturer would replace them once for a small deductible.
The warranty ran out at three years.
He’d had them three and a half.
And Medicare doesn’t pay for hearing aids. Not one dime. I deal with insurance every day, and that’s the rule that makes my patients the angriest. Original Medicare covers a hearing test if your doctor orders it, but not the hearing aids themselves. Dad has Original Medicare and a supplement plan, and none of it would help him.
So my father, a widower living on his co-op pension and Social Security, had just lost $4,100 he couldn’t get back, because my mother-in-law thought it would be funny.
The sun went down. Josh came out of the pond shaking his head, mud up to his knees.
Dad leaned close to me on the hay bale and spoke too loud, the way he does now when he can’t hear.
“Don’t make trouble with her on my account, sis.”
He’s called me sis since I was little. I don’t know where it came from. My mother used to say it was because he’d wanted a boy and settled for calling me something that sounded like one.
“Daddy…”
“I mean it.” He gripped my hand. His fingers were still cold from the pond. “She’s Josh’s mama. You got to live with these people. I’m just an old man at somebody else’s picnic.”
“You’re not just an old man. You’re my dad.”
He couldn’t hear me. He just patted my hand and nodded, like he understood anyway.
I didn’t say one word to Cindy that day.
