I put my head on his shoulder. We sat there until the fireflies came out over the soybeans.
On Monday morning I called the dental office and took a personal day. Dr. Halverson, my boss, didn’t even ask why. He just said, “Take care of whatever it is, Kayla.”
I picked Dad up at eight. He was waiting on his porch in his church clothes, a pressed white shirt and his good khakis, his hair combed with water. He’d dressed up for the audiologist the way men of his generation dress up for the bank or the doctor.
He climbed into my car. “Where are we going, sis?”
I’d written it out on a yellow legal pad the night before. I held it up.
Springfield. Audiologist. New hearing aids. My treat.
He read it twice, and his face changed.
“No, ma’am,” he said too loud. “No. I’ll figure something out.”
I flipped the page. I’d written the next part ahead of time, because I knew exactly what he’d say.
Already made the appointment. 9:30. Don’t argue with me. You taught me not to quit.
He looked at that for a long time. Then he looked out the windshield, and his jaw worked.
“Your mama would’ve done the same thing,” he finally said. “Stubborn as a mule. Just like you.”
We drove the forty minutes to Springfield in silence. He couldn’t hear the radio, so I left it off. He watched the cattle fields and the cell towers go by, and every so often he’d point at something, a hawk on a fence post, a new subdivision going in, and I’d nod.
The audiology clinic was in a brick building off South National Avenue. The audiologist was a calm young woman named Dr. Nguyen with gentle hands and a soft voice. She’d fitted Dad’s original pair and remembered him.
“Mr. Lowery! How are those hearing aids treating you?”
Dad looked at me helplessly. I wrote on my pad: She asked about your hearing aids.
“They’re at the bottom of a pond,” he said loudly.
Dr. Nguyen’s eyebrows went up.
I explained the rest in a low voice while Dad sat in the chair.
Dr. Nguyen listened. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Losing them is hard on anybody. For someone his age, it can be really isolating. People stop going out. They stop talking on the phone. It happens faster than you’d think.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why we’re here.”
She ran a new hearing test. Dad’s hearing had gotten a little worse in three and a half years, which is normal. She recommended the newest version of the same model, slightly stronger, rechargeable, with the same Bluetooth connection to his phone.
Then she printed the quote and slid it across the desk.
The new pair came to $4,300. That included the fitting, follow-up adjustments for a year, and a new three-year loss and damage warranty.
“We have financing options,” Dr. Nguyen said gently.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll pay today.”
I took out my debit card for our joint savings account, the one labeled MOM’S 60TH.
Dad saw the number on the quote and grabbed my arm.
“Kayla. That’s too much. That’s your money.”
I didn’t argue. I wrote on my legal pad in big block letters and held it up so he could read it.
IT’S FAMILY MONEY. YOU’RE FAMILY.
He read it. His chin trembled. He looked down at his big, scarred hands, the hands that had climbed poles for thirty-eight years, and didn’t say anything.
I handed the card to the receptionist. She ran it, and the machine beeped. Approved.
There was $200 left in the account labeled MOM’S 60TH.
Out in the parking lot, Dad stopped beside my car and kept shaking his head.
“That’s your money, Kayla,” he said again, too loud. “Your and Josh’s money. You been saving it for something.”
I didn’t tell him what for. I’ve never told him. He doesn’t know to this day that the money was meant for Cindy’s cruise. I think it would break his heart, and I think he’d try to pay it back, a hundred dollars at a time out of his pension, for the rest of his life.
So I just wrote: We were saving it for something important. This is important.
He folded the page carefully, tore it off the pad, and put it in his shirt pocket.
The new hearing aids had to be ordered from the manufacturer. Dr. Nguyen said it would take three days.
Those three days were hard. I called Dad every morning and every evening by FaceTime, so he could see my face and read my lips. On Tuesday, he didn’t answer. I drove over on my lunch break, my heart in my throat, and found him in the backyard pulling weeds. He hadn’t heard the phone.
On Wednesday, the pharmacy in Ozark called his house phone to say his blood pressure prescription was ready. He didn’t hear that either. I found out because the pharmacist, a sweet woman named Gloria who’s known Dad for twenty years, called me instead.
“Kayla, honey, is your daddy okay? He didn’t pick up, and he always picks up.”
“He’s okay, Gloria. He just can’t hear right now. It’s a long story.”
That night, Josh came home from work at the John Deere dealership and found me crying at the kitchen table.
“He’s going to be okay,” Josh said, putting his arms around me. “Thursday. Just one more day.”
“It’s not just the hearing aids,” I said into his shirt. “It’s that she did this to him, and she doesn’t even care. She hasn’t called. She hasn’t texted. Nothing. She doesn’t even know if he’s okay.”
Josh held me tighter. “She called me,” he said quietly.
I pulled back. “When?”
“Yesterday. She wanted to know if we’d booked the cruise yet. Said the spring prices were dropping, and Darlene at the beauty shop had a cousin who works for a travel agency.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we’d talk Saturday. In person.” He wiped my face with his thumb. “I’m not doing it on the phone, Kayla. She’s going to look at me when I tell her.”
On Thursday, they fitted the new hearing aids.
Dr. Nguyen put them in Dad’s ears in her little exam room with the pictures of mountains on the walls. She plugged them into her computer and adjusted the settings while Dad sat very still in the chair, hands folded in his lap.
“Mr. Lowery,” she said in her normal voice. “Can you hear me?”
Dad’s whole face changed.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. And for the first time in five days, he said it at a normal volume. He didn’t have to shout.
“How does my voice sound?”
“Sounds like you.” He laughed, and his voice cracked. “Sounds just like you.”
Dr. Nguyen spent half an hour showing him how to charge them, how to clean them, and how to connect them to his phone. Then she showed him something new.
“These have a ‘find my hearing aid’ feature on your phone,” she said. “If you ever lose one, the app can show you the last place it was connected.”
“Wouldn’t have helped in the pond,” Dad said dryly.
Dr. Nguyen laughed. “No. But you might want to keep them out of ponds from now on.”
“Wasn’t my idea to go in,” he said.
At the front desk, I asked about one more thing. I’d called Mr. Kessler at Farm Bureau again on Wednesday.
“You can add the new hearing aids to your dad’s homeowner’s policy as scheduled personal property,” he’d told me. “Then they’re covered for loss, even if they get dropped in a pond. It’ll cost him about forty dollars a year. All I need is the receipt.”
I got a copy of the receipt from the clinic, and that afternoon I emailed it to Mr. Kessler. By Friday the hearing aids were listed by serial number on Dad’s policy, covered for $4,300 against any kind of loss.
I’ll tell you, I’ve never been so happy to pay forty dollars in my life.
When we walked out of the clinic into the parking lot, Dad stopped under the oak trees along the sidewalk.
He tilted his head.
“What kind of bird is that?”
I listened. Up in the oak tree, a mockingbird was going through every song it knew: a cardinal, a blue jay, a robin, the squeak of a gate, something that sounded almost like a car alarm. Over and over, running through its whole list, one song after another.
“It’s a mockingbird, Daddy.”
“A mockingbird,” he repeated softly.
He stood there in the parking lot of a medical building on South National Avenue, in his pressed white shirt and his good khakis, with his head tilted back and his eyes closed, listening like it was the first bird God ever made.
I had to look at the pavement for a minute.
