I want to be honest about why. It wasn’t because I wasn’t angry. I was so angry my hands were shaking. It was because I knew if I opened my mouth in front of forty Brandts, I wouldn’t be able to stop. And Josh would be the one standing in the middle of it, and Dad would be the reason, and he would hate that more than losing the hearing aids.
So I helped my father to my car. I drove him home to his little house in Ozark with the windows down, because he likes the night air. At every stoplight I wrote notes on the back of a receipt and held them up so he could read them.
Are you cold?
He shook his head.
Do you want me to stay tonight?
He shook his head again. “I’ll be fine, sis. I got Duke.”
Duke is his old beagle. He’s fourteen, half blind, and as stubborn as Dad.
When we pulled into his driveway, I walked him to the door. Then he did something that made my throat close up.
He stopped on the porch, turned around, and said too loud, “I won’t hear the phone. If you call, I won’t hear it. You’ll have to text me.”
He’d had those hearing aids for three and a half years. Before them, he’d gone ten years pretending he could hear, nodding along at church and at the bank and at my wedding, missing half of every conversation. He told me once that buying them was like somebody turning the lights back on in a house he didn’t know had gone dark.
Now the lights were off again.
I drove home and found Josh sitting on our back steps in the dark, still muddy from the knees down, a beer in his hand that he wasn’t drinking.
I sat down beside him and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“She pushed him, Kayla,” he finally said. “I saw her hands on his back when I came down the hill. That wasn’t a little bump.”
“I know. I was standing right there.”
“And she laughed.”
“She laughed.”
He put his face in his hands.
I need to tell you about Cindy, because otherwise none of this makes sense.
Cindy Brandt is Josh’s mother. She’s fifty-nine, a few months short of sixty. She’s divorced from Josh’s father, Rick, who moved to Tulsa with a woman from his bowling league fifteen years ago and sends Josh a text on his birthday most years.
Cindy is the loudest person in every room. She has opinions about everything and announces all of them. She runs on attention the way a car runs on gas. When things are about her, she’s charming and funny and generous with compliments. When they aren’t, she finds a way to make them about her.
She’s not a monster. I want to be fair about that. She loves Josh in her own way. She’s good with our nephews. She’s the first one to bring a casserole when somebody’s sick.
