Mom used to love mockingbirds. She kept a bird feeder outside the kitchen window of their house on Elm Street for thirty years, and she could name every bird that came to it. When she was dying, in the hospice room at Mercy Hospital, a mockingbird sat outside her window every morning for a week and sang. She said it was the prettiest sound she’d ever heard.
Dad hadn’t been able to hear it. That was before he got his first hearing aids.
He told me once, after she passed, that he’d sat by her bed every morning and watched her smile at that bird, and he couldn’t hear a single note.
Now he stood under the oak tree and listened to the mockingbird for a long, long time.
“Your mama would’ve known what all those songs were,” he said quietly. “Every one of ’em.”
“I know, Daddy.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. He’d heard me. He’d heard me say it in a normal voice, standing three feet away.
He put his arms around me right there in the parking lot and held on.
On Saturday morning, Josh drove out to his mother’s place, and I rode along.
Cindy lives in a tan double-wide on two acres outside Rogersville, about three miles from Uncle Gene’s farm. The yard is full of ceramic geese, wind chimes, and a sign by the porch that says THIS IS MY HAPPY PLACE. Her white Buick Enclave, the one Josh co-signed for, was parked in the gravel drive.
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.”
“No, ma’am,” I said quietly. “I didn’t.”
“She didn’t,” Josh said. “It was my decision too. And I’m the one telling you.”
“I’ve told everybody about that cruise! The whole beauty shop! Darlene! Carol! The ladies from church! What am I supposed to tell them now?”
“Tell them the truth,” Josh said. “Tell them you pushed a sixty-eight-year-old man into a pond, his hearing aids cost forty-one hundred dollars, and your son paid to replace them.”
Cindy stared at him.
“I bought clothes,” she said, and her voice cracked. “I bought three sundresses and a cover-up and a hat. On my Dillard’s card. Six hundred dollars.”
“Then you can return them,” Josh said. “Or you can keep them and pay for them yourself, Mom. Like the rest of us do.”
For a long moment, nobody said anything. The wind chimes on the porch tinkled in the breeze. One of the ceramic geese had fallen over in the flower bed.
Then Cindy did what she always does when she’s losing. She cried.
It wasn’t quiet crying. It was big, loud, heaving sobs, standing in her gravel driveway in a turquoise sundress.
“I can’t believe this,” she wailed. “My own son. On my sixtieth birthday. Choosing her family over his own mother. After everything I’ve done for you, Josh. After I raised you all by myself after your daddy left!”
I felt Josh’s hand twitch. I reached over and squeezed it.
He didn’t back down.
“Mom. I love you,” he said. “But you need to hear this. Two years ago, I co-signed your car loan. You missed three payments, and I paid them. Fourteen hundred and sixty-seven dollars. I never said a word about it. At my wedding, you gave an eleven-minute toast about yourself. At Thanksgiving, you made fun of Leon for not hearing you. And last Saturday, you pushed him into a pond and laughed while he stood there in the water, scared to death, patting his ears.”
Cindy stopped crying. She stared at him with her mouth open.
“I’ve been making excuses for you my whole life,” Josh said, and his voice finally shook. “Dad left, and you were hurting, and I understood that. But Leon has never done one unkind thing to you. Not one. He comes to our reunions because I invite him. He brings pie. He stands in the back. And you treated him like he was nothing.”
“I didn’t…”
“You did, Mom. And you didn’t even call to see if he was okay. Not once. All week. You called me to ask about the cruise.”
Cindy opened her mouth again. This time, nothing came out.
“I’m not cutting you off,” Josh said. “You’re still my mother. You’re still coming to Thanksgiving. But there’s no cruise. And I want you to think about what you did.”
He turned and walked back to the truck.
I stood in the gravel a moment longer, looking at my mother-in-law. She looked small all of a sudden, standing in front of her THIS IS MY HAPPY PLACE sign in a sundress she couldn’t afford.
“He can hear the birds again,” I said quietly. “My dad. On Thursday, in the parking lot, he heard a mockingbird. He just stood there and listened to it.”
Cindy looked at me. Something flickered across her face. I couldn’t tell what.
Then I got in the truck, and Josh drove us home.
Neither of us said anything for the first five miles. Then, at the stop sign on Highway 125, Josh pulled over onto the shoulder, put the truck in park, and put his forehead against the steering wheel.
He was shaking.
“I did it,” he said into the steering wheel. “I actually did it.”
“You did it.”
“I’ve never talked to her like that in my life.”
“I know.”
He lifted his head and looked at me. His eyes were red. “Did I go too far?”
I thought about my father in the pond, waist-deep in the brown water, patting his ears.
“No, baby,” I said. “You went exactly far enough.”
The next two weeks were quiet. Cindy didn’t call. She didn’t text. She skipped Sunday dinner at Uncle Gene’s, which she’d never done in thirty years.
But she did go to the beauty shop.
On the Friday after we told her, Cindy went to Darlene’s Shear Elegance for her standing ten o’clock appointment. Josh’s Aunt Peggy, who also gets her hair done there, told us what happened.
Cindy sat in Darlene’s chair and announced to the whole shop that her daughter-in-law had “stolen her cruise money” and spent it on “her daddy,” and that her own son had “turned against her.”
She expected sympathy.
What she didn’t know was that Darlene’s brother is Tyler’s father-in-law. Tyler was one of the cousins who walked the pond bottom until dark looking for the hearing aids. And Tyler had told his wife, and his wife had told her mother, and her mother had told Darlene, and by that Friday, every single woman in that beauty shop already knew exactly what had happened on that dock.
According to Aunt Peggy, Darlene stopped cutting Cindy’s hair. She set her scissors down on the counter. She looked at Cindy in the mirror.
“Cindy,” Darlene said, in front of the whole shop, “I heard you pushed Leon Lowery off Gene’s dock and his hearing aids sank. Is that true?”
The shop went dead quiet.
Cindy started to say it was a joke.
