Josh didn’t say much on the drive. His hands were tight on the steering wheel of his truck. At a stop sign on Highway 125, he looked over at me.
“If I start backing down,” he said, “you squeeze my hand.”
“You won’t back down.”
“I’ve been backing down from her my whole life, Kayla.”
“Not today.”
When we pulled into the gravel drive, Cindy came down her porch steps to meet us in the front yard. She was wearing one of the new Dillard’s sundresses, a turquoise one with big white hibiscus flowers, and her hair was freshly done. Friday had been beauty shop day.
“There’s my boy,” she said, holding her arms out.
Josh didn’t hug her.
He stood in the gravel with his hands in his jacket pockets, and he looked straight at his mother.
“Mom, there’s no cruise.”
She laughed. It was the same laugh from the dock, high and bright and careless.
“Very funny.”
“It’s not a joke,” he said. “Kayla spent it Monday. On Leon’s ears.”
Cindy looked at me. Then at her son. Then she opened her mouth.
What came out was a sound I’d never heard from her before. It wasn’t a word. It was a kind of strangled gasp, like somebody had knocked the wind out of her.
“You spent my cruise money,” she said finally, very slowly, “on that old man’s hearing aids?”
“It wasn’t your money, Mom. It was ours. We saved it. And yes, we spent it on Leon’s hearing aids. The ones you knocked into the pond.”
“I did not knock them into the pond! He fell!”
“You pushed him.” Josh’s voice was steady. “I saw your hands on his back when I came down the hill. Kayla was standing right there. So were forty other people.”
“It was a joke! Everybody was laughing!”
“Nobody was laughing, Mom. Except you.”
Cindy’s face went red under her makeup. She looked at me, and her eyes narrowed.
“This is your doing,” she said. “You put him up to this.”
