My Mother-in-Law Pushed My 68-Year-Old Dad Into a Pond and Ruined His $4,100 Hearing Aids, So I Spent Her Cruise Money Replacing Them

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.

But she’s careless with other people. With their feelings, their time, and their things. And when she breaks something, she laughs and tells you to lighten up.

At our wedding seven years ago, she gave a toast at the reception that lasted eleven minutes and was mostly about her own wedding. When Josh and I bought our house, she showed up on moving day, criticized the kitchen cabinets, and left before anything got carried in.

Two years ago, Josh co-signed a loan for her car, a white Buick Enclave, because her credit wasn’t good enough after the divorce. She missed three payments. Each time, the credit union called Josh, and Josh paid it so his own credit wouldn’t take the hit. That was $1,467 she never paid back. She never mentioned it, and Josh never asked.

And she’d never been kind to my father. Not mean, exactly. Just dismissive. At Christmas she talked over him. At the reunions she called him “Josh’s wife’s daddy” instead of his name. At Thanksgiving she once asked him, loudly, in front of everybody, whether he could even hear what she was saying, and then laughed when he said “What?”

My father has never said one unkind word about her. Not one.

So here’s what I hadn’t told anybody.

For eighteen months, Josh and I had been putting back $250 a month into a savings account at our credit union. The account was labeled MOM’S 60TH on our banking app.

We were going to send Cindy on a cruise for her sixtieth birthday next spring: four nights out of Galveston to Cozumel, an ocean-view cabin, with a little extra for her shore excursions and souvenirs. It was Josh’s idea. His mother had always wanted to go on a cruise. She’d talked about it his whole life. She’d never been anywhere farther than Branson.

By June, the account held $4,500.

And Cindy knew. Josh had made the mistake of mentioning it at Christmas, with the details still fuzzy, and she had grabbed onto it with both hands. She’d been telling the whole beauty shop about it ever since.

Every Friday morning, Cindy got her hair done at Darlene’s Shear Elegance on Main Street. Every Friday since Christmas, according to everyone in town, she’d told the ladies under the dryers about her cruise. “My son is sending me on a cruise for my sixtieth. Out of Galveston. Ocean view. He’s such a good boy.”

She’d already bought cruise clothes. She’d shown me a new swimsuit cover-up and three sundresses from Dillard’s, charged to her store card. She’d bought a waterproof phone case and a sun hat with a brim the size of a hubcap.

The cruise wasn’t booked yet. We were waiting for the spring prices to drop. The money was still sitting in our account.

That Sunday evening, the day after the reunion, I sat with Josh on our back steps again. The cicadas were loud in the oak trees. The light was going gold over the neighbor’s soybean field.

I’d been thinking about it all day.

“I want to spend it on Dad,” I said.

Josh didn’t answer right away. He looked out at the yard for a long time, at the clothesline, the swing set we’d put up for the nephews, the garden with its rows of green beans.

I’d spent the morning doing what I do at work. I’d made phone calls and gotten the facts.

First I called Dad’s homeowner’s insurance agent, a nice man named Mr. Kessler at the Farm Bureau office in Ozark. I asked whether Dad’s policy would cover the hearing aids.

“I’m sorry, Kayla,” he said. “Unless he’d added them to his policy as scheduled personal property, a standard homeowner’s policy generally doesn’t cover something just being lost in a pond. It covers things like fire and theft. Dropping something in the water isn’t one of the covered causes. I wish I had better news.”

Then I called the audiology clinic in Springfield. The office manager confirmed that the loss and damage warranty on Dad’s pair had expired six months earlier. A new comparable pair would run between $4,000 and $4,500, depending on the model. They offered financing through a medical credit card, at zero interest for twelve months but twenty-six percent after that.

I knew all about those medical credit cards from work. I’ve seen them swallow older patients whole.

Then, God help me, I looked up the small claims court rules in Missouri. You can sue someone in small claims for up to $5,000 without a lawyer. The filing fee in Greene County is around forty dollars. I could have filed against Cindy for the full $4,100, and I had forty witnesses.

I sat at my kitchen table and imagined it. Me and Dad on one side of a courtroom. Cindy on the other, in her coral lipstick. Josh in the middle, having to testify about his own mother.

I closed the laptop.

“I’m not suing your mother,” I told Josh on the steps. “I thought about it. I looked it up. But I’m not putting you through that. And Dad would never forgive me.”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

“But I’m not letting him go deaf again either. He can’t afford it, Josh. He’s on a fixed income. His pension from the co-op is eighteen hundred a month, and his Social Security is about fourteen hundred. His property taxes and his supplement premium alone eat up a big chunk of that. He’d put it on one of those twenty-six percent cards before he’d ask me for help. Or he’d just go without. He went without for ten years before.”

Josh still didn’t say anything.

“The cruise money is ours,” I said. “We saved it. We earned it. And your mother is the reason my dad can’t hear the phone ring.”

Josh set down his beer.

“It was ours to give,” he said finally, still looking at the yard. “Do it.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

Then he said something that made me love him more than I already did.

“And I’ll tell Mom myself.”

“Josh, you don’t have to…”

“Yes, I do.” He turned and looked at me. His eyes were wet. “She pushed your father into a pond, Kayla. Then she laughed at him. And I stood there with a pair of barbecue tongs and didn’t say a single word to her because forty people were watching.” He shook his head. “I’m thirty-six years old. I’m done being scared of my mother.”