Chapter One: The Dock
During the Meeks family reunion, my mother-in-law shoved my sixty-eight-year-old father off the dock.
Later, she claimed it was a joke. She repeated that about a hundred times.
I was just three feet away when it occurred. I witnessed her hands press flat against his back. I saw her lean into it. I saw Dad’s arms extend, like a man’s arms do when the ground isn’t where he left it.
Then he fell into the water.
Dad surfaced, sputtering, waist-deep in the murky water next to the dock.
Uncle Wade’s farm pond is roughly an acre and a half, located past Buffalo, Missouri, nestled between two hayfields. Cattle drink from it. In July, it resembles chocolate milk, with a slick of green around the edges and a soft mud bottom that envelops your feet to the ankles.
His light blue button-up shirt was soaked up to his chest. The one he wore to church. He chose it because it was a family tradition and he wanted to look presentable. The water had risen past his belt buckle.
He stood there blinking, pond water streaming from his gray hair and down his face.
His hand moved to his left ear.
Then to his right.
Nothing there.
Forty people at the reunion fell silent simultaneously.
All the Meeks cousins, aunts, uncles, and children were scattered across Uncle Wade’s yard on lawn chairs and blankets, and the tailgates of trucks. Moments before, music had been playing on someone’s Bluetooth speaker, kids were shrieking on the slip-and-slide, and the aroma of brisket smoking on the hill filled the air.
Now, it was silent. Just the speaker playing Alan Jackson to an empty audience, the cicadas buzzing, and my father standing in the pond with both hands pressed to his vacant ears.
Cindy stood on the dock behind me, holding her paper plate.
Potato salad, a deviled egg, and a slice of watermelon. She hadn’t even put it down to do it.
She was smiling.
“Oh, Leon, lighten up,” she said. Loud enough for everyone to hear. “It’s July. You needed to cool off. You should’ve taken them out.”
A laugh came from the bank. One of the teenage cousins. Then it stopped.
Dad looked up at her from the water. He saw her lips move. He couldn’t hear a word of it.
Without thinking, I knelt on that dock in my yellow sundress. The one I had bought at Dillard’s for the reunion, wanting to look nice as well. The boards were rough and slick, scraping against my knees.
I reached for his hand.
“Dad,” I said. “Dad, here. Take my hand.”
He gazed at my face. He couldn’t hear me, but he could read my lips. He had been reading my lips since I was a baby. He took my hand.
His hand trembled. My father’s hands don’t tremble.
He’s sixty-eight. His name is Leon Pruitt. He worked as a lineman for the Southwest Electric Cooperative for thirty-eight years. Through ice storms, tornadoes, and summer heat that could make you feel like you were cooking inside your rubber gloves. He’s been up a pole during a lightning storm with forty thousand volts just three feet away, and he’s never once lost his footing.
He doesn’t fall into ponds.
He doesn’t stand in the water with his hands over his ears looking bewildered.
I pulled. He got one foot on the bottom rung of the old wooden ladder Uncle Wade nailed to the side of the dock. Then the other. Water streamed off him. His good church shoes squelched.
I got him up onto the dock. He stood there dripping. He looked down at me, then at the water, at the spot where he had entered.
“They’re gone, sis,” he said. Too loud. Way too loud. Everybody heard him. “They fell out. They’re gone.”
—
### Chapter Two: Walking the Bottom
Josh was up the hill assisting his uncle with the brisket when it occurred.
He had been there for an hour, him, Uncle Wade, and a large black offset smoker Wade crafted from an old propane tank. Josh is skilled with a smoker. He was slicing the first brisket when he heard everyone go quiet, and he glanced down the hill, noticing my dad standing on the dock, drenched.
By the time he dashed down, I had already pulled Dad out of the water.
He rushed across the yard at a full sprint, still holding the brisket knife. He halted at the end of the dock, panting.
“What happened?”
I didn’t respond. I looked at his mother.
Cindy was still there with her paper plate. Some cousins had come down to the dock. One of the aunts handed Dad a beach towel adorned with a cartoon shark.
“It was a joke, Joshie,” Cindy said. “For heaven’s sake. Everyone’s acting like I shot him.”
Josh glanced at his mother. Then at my dad, wrapped in a shark towel, with his hands still going to his ears every few seconds. As if he couldn’t comprehend that they were truly empty.
“His hearing aids,” I said softly. “They were in.”
Josh shut his eyes.
He understood what they signified. He’s known my dad almost as long as he’s known me.
Dad lost most of his hearing on the job. Thirty-eight years around transformers, bucket trucks, chainsaws, and generators will do that. The co-op mandated earplugs after about 1995. By then, it was too late. By the time he retired, he couldn’t hear the phone ring. He couldn’t hear the TV unless it was set so loud that the neighbors complained.
For three years after retirement, he simply stopped hearing things. He stopped going to church because he couldn’t hear the sermon. He stopped visiting the café in the morning because he couldn’t hear the other men at the table. He sat alone in his house in Buffalo.
Then, three and a half years ago, I insisted he see an audiologist. I drove him myself.
The day he received his first pair, he cried in the parking lot. He said he could hear his own footsteps. He hadn’t heard them in fifteen years.
Josh and two cousins walked the pond bottom barefoot until dark.
Josh, along with his cousins Travis and Cody. They stripped down to their swim trunks and waded out to where Dad fell in. They walked in a grid, slowly, side by side, feeling the bottom with their toes. The mud reached their shins. The water went up to their chests.
They discovered a fishing lure. A green plastic worm on a hook, probably lost by Uncle Wade around 1994.
They found a beer can. A flip-flop. A rock that Cody insisted felt just like a hearing aid until he pulled it up.
Not the hearing aids.
I knew they wouldn’t find them. I realized it from the very first moment.
I work in a dental office. Dr. Heller’s office, on Main Street in Bolivar. I’m the office manager. I handle insurance, billing, scheduling, and patient complaints. Part of my job involves knowing what equipment costs and what destroys it.
I understand what water does to any device with a battery. Even if they found them, they’d be ruined. Pond water, mud, bacteria. The tiny microphones and circuits would be destroyed in moments.
Dad had spent four thousand one hundred dollars on that pair. Three and a half years ago.
I knew that because I helped him write the check. He had been saving for two years. From his co-op pension and Social Security. Fifty dollars here, a hundred there, in a coffee can in his kitchen. He brought the coffee can to the audiologist and counted it out on the counter.
They came with a loss and damage warranty. Three years. If you lost or broke them, the manufacturer would replace them for a deductible.
The warranty expired at three.
Six months ago.
And Medicare doesn’t cover hearing aids.
People don’t believe that when I explain it. They assume Medicare covers everything for seniors. It doesn’t. Original Medicare doesn’t cover hearing aids. Or the exams to fit them. Dad has a supplement plan through the co-op retirees’ group, and it doesn’t cover them either.
You can now purchase over-the-counter ones at Walmart or the pharmacy. A few hundred dollars. But those are for mild hearing loss. Dad’s is severe. The audiologist informed us that on the first day. He needed real ones. Prescription ones, tailored to his ears.
Four thousand dollars, or he goes back to not hearing anything.
On the bank, as dusk approached, Dad sat in a lawn chair wrapped in the shark towel. He was watching the boys search the pond. He hadn’t said much in two hours. When people spoke to him, he simply nodded.
I settled in the grass beside his chair. He leaned toward me.
“Don’t create trouble with her on my account, sis,” he said.
Too loud. Way too loud. Half the reunion heard him.
Cindy, seated at the picnic table with her sisters, heard him as well. She glanced over at us. Then looked away and laughed at something her sister said.
I didn’t utter a word to Cindy that day.
Not one. Not when she approached to say goodbye at the cars and told my dad, “No hard feelings, Leon, okay? You know me.” Not when she hugged Josh and remarked, “Your father-in-law needs a sense of humor.”
I simply smiled. I’m good at smiling. Ask anyone at Dr. Heller’s office.
Then I drove my father home to Buffalo. He sat in the passenger seat with his wet church shirt drying stiffly and stared out the window at the hayfields passing by in the dark.
He didn’t say anything the entire way. He couldn’t hear the radio, so I turned it off.
—
### Chapter Three: Who Cindy Is
I need to share about my mother-in-law. So you can understand.
Cindy Meeks is fifty-nine. She operates the cash register at the Dollar General in Buffalo four days a week and has her hair styled every Thursday at Shear Elegance on Ash Street. She’s loud, funny, and the life of every celebration. She’s also the type who finds the most amusing thing in the world is someone else’s embarrassment.
She has always been that way. Josh says she has always been that way.
At our wedding rehearsal dinner, she announced to forty people that I was pregnant. I wasn’t. She thought it was hilarious. My grandmother cried.
During Thanksgiving two years ago, she placed a whoopee cushion on Josh’s ninety-year-old great-aunt’s chair. Aunt Opal sat on it. Everyone laughed. Aunt Opal turned red and left before dessert.
At Josh’s cousin’s baby shower, she wrapped an empty box in pretty paper, topped with a bow. When Brittany opened it, Cindy exclaimed, “That’s what you’ll have left of your social life!” And laughed so hard she had to sit down.
She’s not cruel, exactly. Josh always says that. “She’s not mean, Kayla. She just doesn’t know when to quit.”
I’m not certain there’s a distinction.
Josh’s dad passed away when Josh was eleven.
His name was Ray Meeks. He was a lineman too. The same co-op as my dad. He died in the ice storm of January 2007, the significant one that brought down power lines from Joplin to St. Louis. He was working a night shift north of Buffalo, restoring power to a farmhouse with an elderly man on oxygen inside. A tree limb fell on the line he was working on.
Josh doesn’t discuss it much. Neither does Cindy.
I know Josh grew up without a father from age eleven onward. Cindy raised him and his sister alone on a cashier’s salary and Ray’s co-op life insurance. I understand it was tough.
And I know that when Josh was sixteen and began dating me, my dad was the first adult who took any real interest in him.
Dad taught Josh to fish. He took him to Cardinals games in St. Louis. When Josh’s truck broke down, Dad was the one who crawled under it with him. When Josh asked me to marry him, he asked my dad first, sitting on Dad’s front porch, and Dad later told me he cried after Josh left.
Josh refers to him as Leon. But he looks at him like some men look at their fathers.
Cindy noticed. Naturally, she noticed.
Here’s what I hadn’t shared with anyone. Not even my dad.
Josh and I had been saving two hundred and fifty dollars a month for eighteen months. In a separate savings account at Mid-Missouri Bank, with a little tag on it in the online banking app. MOM’S CRUISE.
Four thousand five hundred dollars.
A cruise for Cindy’s sixtieth birthday next spring. Departing from Galveston. Five nights. Cozumel and Costa Maya. A balcony cabin. She’d never been on a cruise. She’d never traveled much, really. Just to Branson once. Eureka Springs.
It was Josh’s idea. He felt his mom had sacrificed everything for him and his sister. He wanted to give her something significant.
We planned to surprise her at Christmas. Wrap up a little plastic boat in a box.
But she found out. Josh’s sister Brittany let it slip at Easter. And Cindy had been sharing the news with everyone at Shear Elegance ever since. Every Thursday. Her son was taking her on a cruise. A balcony cabin. She’d already purchased two new swimsuits at the JCPenney in Springfield and a large floppy hat.
She had been telling everyone at the reunion about it too. Just before she pushed my dad off the dock.
—
### Chapter Four: The Back Steps
On Sunday evening, I sat with Josh on our back steps.
We reside in a small brick ranch house in Bolivar, about thirty minutes from Buffalo. Three bedrooms, a chain-link fence, a maple tree in the backyard with a tire swing Josh hung for the nieces and nephews.
It was hot and still. Fireflies were rising from the grass. Josh had two beers. He handed me one. I didn’t drink it.
I spent most of Sunday on the phone. And on my laptop. Doing what I do at work every day. Determining who pays for what.
“I called the audiologist,” I said. “In Springfield. The one who fitted Dad’s first pair.”
Josh nodded.
“The warranty’s expired. It ended in January. There’s nothing they can do about the old ones.” I took a breath. “A new pair of the same model is four thousand three hundred. Prices have gone up.”
“Okay.”
“Medicare won’t cover it. His supplement won’t cover it. I called both.”
Josh remained silent. He stared at the tire swing.
“I looked into one more thing,” I said. “Your mom’s homeowner’s insurance.”
Josh turned and looked at me.
“Most homeowner’s policies have personal liability coverage,” I explained carefully. “If you accidentally damage someone else’s property, it pays. Like if you hit a baseball through the neighbor’s window. Or if you push someone into a pond and ruin their hearing aids.”
“Kayla…”
“I’m not suggesting we should,” I clarified. “I’m just saying it exists. Someone would have to file a claim against her policy. Dad would have to do it. Or she would.”
Josh was quiet for a long time.
“Dad would never,” I said. “You heard him. Don’t create trouble with her on my account.”
“And Mom would never admit she did anything wrong,” Josh replied.
“No.”
We sat there in silence for a while. A whip-poor-will started up somewhere down the road.
Then I spoke up.
“I want to spend it on Dad.”
Josh didn’t move.
“The cruise money,” I said. “I want to withdraw it tomorrow and buy him new hearing aids. I’ll take a personal day. I’ll drive him to Springfield myself.”
I waited.
“I know it’s your mom’s birthday present,” I continued. “I know she’s been telling everyone. I know it’ll create a mess. But Josh, he can’t hear. He’s sitting alone in his house in Buffalo right now, unable to hear the TV or the phone or anything. And he’s not going to ask anyone for help. He never has.”
Josh stared at the yard for a long time.
He looked at the tire swing. At the maple tree. At the fireflies rising from the grass.
I thought he was going to say no. I thought he would say, it’s my mom, Kayla. It’s her birthday. We promised.
“It was ours to give,” he finally said. “Do it.”
I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
Then he added something else.
“And I’ll tell Mom myself.”
“Josh, you don’t have to…”
“Yes, I do,” he insisted. He set his beer down on the step. “She pushed your dad off a dock, Kayla. In front of forty people. A sixty-eight-year-old man who climbed poles with my father.” His voice tightened. “And then she told him to lighten up.”
He stood up.
“I’m not going to let you be the one who tells her,” he said. “She’ll make it about you. She’ll portray you as the villain. I know how she operates.” He looked down at me. “It’s my money too. It’s my mom. I’ll tell her.”
—
### Chapter Five: Springfield
On Monday morning, I took a personal day and drove Dad to the audiologist in Springfield.
I called Dr. Heller at seven and informed her I had a family emergency. She didn’t ask questions. She’s been my boss for nine years.
Then I drove to Buffalo and picked up Dad. He was waiting on his front porch in a clean shirt. A plaid one, not the blue. I believe the blue one was still drying on the line in the back.
He didn’t know where we were headed. I had simply texted him: Picking you up at 8. Wear shoes.
He got in the car and looked at me.
“Where to, sis?” Too loud.
I held up the legal pad I had brought. I had written it on the first page in large black letters.
SPRINGFIELD. HEARING AIDS.
He read it. He looked at me.
“Kayla,” he said. “No.”
I flipped the page. I had already written the next one.
ALREADY MADE THE APPOINTMENT.
“I can’t afford it,” he insisted. “You know I can’t. I’ll get the cheap ones. At Walmart.”
I flipped the page.
AUDIOLOGIST SAID NO. TOO WEAK FOR YOU.
He gazed out the windshield. His jaw clenched.
“I’ll save up,” he said. “Like last time.”
I flipped the page. I didn’t have anything written on it. I grabbed the pen from the cup holder and wrote quickly.
IT’LL TAKE 2 YEARS. YOU’LL BE ALONE IN THAT HOUSE FOR 2 YEARS.
He read it. He didn’t say anything further.
I put the car in drive.
The audiologist’s office was in a medical building on Battlefield Road. Ozarks Hearing Center. The same place as before.
Dr. Anjali Patel came out to the waiting room herself. She’s around forty, with dark hair in a bun and kind eyes. She remembered Dad.
“Mr. Pruitt,” she said, loud and slow, facing him so he could read her lips. “I’m so sorry about what happened.”
Dad nodded. He looked embarrassed.
“Come on back,” she said.
She tested him again. Forty-five minutes in a soundproof booth, with headphones on, pressing a button every time he heard a beep.
His hearing had worsened. Not drastically. But some. Dr. Patel showed me the chart afterward. A line that dipped down, like a ski slope.
“Severe to profound in the high frequencies,” she said. “Moderately severe in the lows. He needs power. The over-the-counter devices only accommodate mild to moderate loss. They’d be like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg.”
“So the same model?”
“The newer version,” she replied. “Better feedback control. Bluetooth, so he can stream phone calls directly into his ears.” She paused. “And a rechargeable battery. No more fiddling with those little batteries. His hands had trouble with those last time.”
“How much?”
She glanced at her computer.
“Four thousand three hundred,” she stated. “That includes the fitting, follow-ups for three years, and a three-year loss and damage warranty.” She hesitated. “I’ll be honest, Mrs. Meeks. I’d advise getting him a waterproof case and a clip. After this.”
I wrote the check at the front desk. From the account with the little tag that read MOM’S CRUISE.
Four thousand three hundred dollars. That left two hundred in the account.
The receptionist handed me a receipt. I folded it and placed it in my purse.
Dad stood next to me at the counter. He watched me write the check. He didn’t say anything. His face was very red.
Outside at the car, Dad continued shaking his head.
He stood by the passenger door in the hot parking lot with his hands in his pockets. He wouldn’t get in.
“That’s your money, Kayla,” he said. Too loud. A woman entering the building turned around and stared at us. “That’s your and Josh’s money. I saw the account. I saw what it said on there.”
I hadn’t realized he had seen it. I had tried to conceal the checkbook register.
“That’s Cindy’s cruise,” he said. “I can’t take Cindy’s cruise. Not after… not after all this. She’ll never forgive you. She’ll never forgive Josh.”
I opened my legal pad on the hood of the car. It was so hot I could feel it through the cardboard backing. I wrote slowly, in large letters, so he could read every word.
Then I held it up.
IT’S FAMILY MONEY. YOU’RE FAMILY.
He read it. His face changed. His chin began to tremble.
I flipped to a new page and wrote one more line. I held it up.
AND JOSH SAID YES BEFORE I EVEN FINISHED ASKING.
Dad stared at that for a long time. Then he looked away. Out at the traffic on Battlefield Road.
“That boy,” he said quietly. Too loud still. But quieter.
He got into the car.
—
### Chapter Six: The Mockingbird
They fitted them on Thursday.
I took another half day. Dr. Heller just raised an eyebrow and said, “Go.”
The fitting took an hour. Dr. Patel inserted them in his ears and connected them to her computer with a small cable, adjusting the settings. She’d say words to him. Baseball. Sidewalk. Hot dog. And he’d repeat them back. Every few minutes she’d turn something up or down on her screen.
At the end, she leaned back in her chair.
“Mr. Pruitt,” she said. In a normal voice. Not loud. Not slow.
He turned his head. Quickly. As if someone had touched him.
“How does that sound?” she inquired.
Dad didn’t respond right away. He just sat in the chair with his mouth slightly open.
“I can hear you,” he said. And he said it at a normal volume. For the first time since the reunion.
Dr. Patel handed him a little black case, the charging case, and demonstrated how to use it. And a waterproof clip with a lanyard, so he could attach them to his collar when he removed them. And a little card with her phone number on it, in case anything went wrong.
“If anyone pushes you into a pond again,” she said, “take them out first.”
Dad laughed. Then he looked at me.
I knew he was hearing his own laugh. I could see it on his face.
Outside in the parking lot, he paused under the trees.
There’s a row of pear trees along the edge of the lot at Ozarks Hearing Center. Bradford pears, the kind the city plants everywhere. It was hot and still, and the air smelled like asphalt and freshly cut grass.
Dad stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. He tilted his head.
“What kind of bird is that?” he asked.
I listened. I hadn’t even noticed it.
A mockingbird. Up in one of the pear trees. Mimicking every song it knew. A cardinal. Then a blue jay. Then a robin. Then something resembling a car alarm, which mockingbirds in town often do. Then a whistle, three notes, up and down.
“It’s a mockingbird, Dad,” I explained. “It’s copying other birds.”
He didn’t reply. He stood under the pear tree with his head tilted up and his hands at his sides.
He stood there listening as if it were the first bird God ever created.
I had to look at the pavement for a moment.
The thing is, I knew he’d heard birds before. He’d had hearing aids for three and a half years. He’d heard mockingbirds.
But I think, for five days, he believed he’d never hear one again. I think he’d sat alone in his house in Buffalo for five days, with the TV on mute, and concluded this was the rest of his life.
And now, here was a mockingbird in a pear tree in a parking lot in Springfield, singing as if it were putting on a performance just for him.
“Your mother used to say they sing all night in May,” Dad reminisced. His voice was thick. “Kept her awake. She’d poke me in the ribs. Leon, make it stop. And I’d say, what do you want me to do, climb up there and ask it nicely?”
Mom passed away six years ago. Pancreatic cancer. She was sixty-one.
I had never heard that story before.
“She’d have loved this one,” Dad said. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “This one’s a real show-off.”
On the drive home, he talked the entire way. Forty-five minutes. He discussed the co-op. About Mom. About the ice storm in 2007, and the time he got stuck in a bucket truck for six hours in a blizzard outside Fair Grove. About the Cardinals’ bullpen.
He kept pausing mid-sentence. To listen to the turn signal clicking. To the tires on the road. To my radio, which I had turned on low, playing a George Strait song.
“I can hear the fiddle,” he said. “Kayla. Listen. You can hear the fiddle.”
I could hear it too. I had never noticed it before either.
I dropped him off in Buffalo at four o’clock. He stood on his front porch and waved as I backed out of the driveway.
Then, as I was driving away, he called out something. I rolled down the window.
“What, Dad?”
“I said thank you,” he said. At a normal volume. From his porch. Twenty feet away. “I heard myself say it.”
—
### Chapter Seven: Cindy’s Porch
On Saturday, Josh drove out to his mother’s house.
I went along. He didn’t want me to at first. He said he’d handle it. But I insisted I wasn’t going to let him face that alone either.
Cindy lives in the house where Josh grew up. A small white two-bedroom on the edge of Buffalo, on Hickory Street, with a carport and a porch swing and about forty wind chimes. She collects them. You can hear her house from a block away when the wind blows.
It was blowing that morning. The wind chimes were going wild.
Cindy descended her porch steps to greet us in the front yard.
She wore capris and a T-shirt that read LIFE IS BETTER AT THE LAKE. Her hair was styled. It was Saturday, so she’d been to Shear Elegance on Thursday. She sported a big smile.
“There’s my boy,” she said.
She extended her arms.
Josh didn’t embrace her.
She paused. Her arms slowly lowered. She looked at him. Then at me, standing behind him by the truck.
“Well,” she said. “What’s wrong with you two? You look like someone died.”
Josh inhaled deeply. I could see his hands trembling slightly at his sides.
“Mom,” he said. “There’s no cruise.”
She laughed.
The same laugh. The one from the dock. Light and high and a bit too loud.
“Very funny,” she said.
“It’s not a joke, Mom,” Josh stated. “Kayla spent it Monday. On Leon’s ears.”
Cindy turned to me.
Then back to her son.
Then she opened her mouth.
And what emerged was not what I anticipated.
“On Leon’s ears,” she repeated.
Quietly. Flatly. Like she was saying it to herself.
“Four thousand three hundred dollars,” I interjected. “That’s what they cost. We had four thousand five hundred saved.”
She stared at me. The wind chimes were ringing behind her, a hundred little bells all at once.
“You spent my sixtieth birthday,” she said slowly, “on that old man.”
“Mom…”
“On that deaf old man,” she raised her voice. “Who isn’t even yours, Josh. He’s not your father. He’s her father. And you gave him my birthday.”
Josh turned pale.
“Mom,” he said. “You pushed him into a pond.”
“It was a joke!”
“He’s sixty-eight! He couldn’t hear for six days!”
“Then he should have taken them out!” Cindy was now yelling. Her face was flushed. “Everyone knows you take your hearing aids out around water! That’s on him! Not me!”
The neighbor across the street, an elderly man in a lawn chair, stood up and retreated inside.
“You told everyone,” Josh accused. His voice was very quiet. “Didn’t you? At the beauty shop. About the cruise.”
“Of course I told them! I was excited! My son was taking me on a cruise!”
“So now you’re upset because you have to inform them it’s not happening.”
Cindy halted.
“That’s what this is about,” Josh said. “Isn’t it? Not Leon. Not his ears. You’re embarrassed.”
She didn’t reply. She turned around and marched back up her porch steps, stopping at the door.
Then she turned back.
“He’s always been the one,” she said. Her voice trembled. “Since you were sixteen. Leon this, Leon that. Leon took you to the Cardinals. Leon taught you to fish. Leon helped you fix your truck.” She was now crying. Angry tears. “And I’m the one who raised you, Joshua. By myself. On a cashier’s paycheck. After your father…”
She paused.
“I’m the one who stayed,” she said. “And he gets my birthday.”
She went inside and slammed the door. The wind chimes rang out all at once.
Josh stood in the front yard for a long time.
I approached him and took his hand. It was cold, even in July.
“She’s never said that before,” he said quietly. “About Leon. Not once.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t realize she felt that way.”
“I know.”
He gazed up at the house. At the forty wind chimes. At the porch swing his father had hung in 1998, still swinging.
“Let’s go home,” he said.
—
### Chapter Eight: The Beauty Shop
By Thursday, the entire town was aware.
That’s how it operates in Buffalo, Missouri. Population three thousand. Cindy visited Shear Elegance on Thursday afternoon, as usual. And she shared with everyone.
Except it wasn’t the story that transpired.
My coworker Tammy informed me. Her sister-in-law gets her hair done at Shear Elegance on Thursdays as well.
“She says you stole her cruise,” Tammy mentioned at the front desk at Dr. Heller’s. She said it quietly, so the patients in the waiting room wouldn’t hear. “She claims you convinced Josh to retract her birthday present to cover your dad’s hearing aids. She says your dad feigned being upset to extract money from you.”
I set down the phone I was holding.
“She says it was just a little joke at the reunion,” Tammy continued. “And he made a big deal out of it. And now she’s not going on her cruise, and everyone’s supposed to feel sorry for him.”
“Is that what people think?” I asked.
Tammy hesitated. “Some of them.”
I didn’t respond.
I want to be truthful about that. I wanted to. I wanted to call every woman at Shear Elegance and explain precisely what happened. I wanted to recount the shark towel, the empty ears, and the boys walking the pond until nightfall.
But I thought about Dad, on the bank, leaning over to me. Too loud.
Don’t create trouble with her on my account, sis.
So I didn’t.
Josh learned about it at the feed store. His cousin Cody told him at the gas station. Someone posted something on the Buffalo Community Facebook group about “people who exploit their elderly parents to guilt-trip family members out of money.” No names. But everyone knew.
Josh read it on his phone at the kitchen table that night. He placed his phone face down and remained silent for a long time.
“Should I say something?” he asked. “Post something? Inform people what truly happened?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Would it help?”
“No,” he said. “It would merely create two sides. And then everyone would have to choose one.”
Dad heard it at the café.
That was the aspect I didn’t consider. Dad returned to the Buffalo Café the Tuesday following the acquisition of his new hearing aids. For the first time in a week. He sat at the long table in the back with the retired men, just like he used to every morning before his hearing deteriorated.
And he heard everything. Every word. Clear as a bell. Better than he had in fifteen years.
Including what Walt Hensley’s wife said at the booth behind him to Lois Kemper.
“That Kayla Meeks took Cindy’s cruise money and spent it on her own daddy. Can you believe that? After Cindy raised that boy all by herself.”
Dad remained silent. He finished his coffee. He paid his bill. He left a dollar for the waitress.
Then he went home and called me. On his phone. Which he could now hear, through the Bluetooth, directly into his ears.
“Sis,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“Does Cindy know about Ray?”
I didn’t understand.
“Josh’s dad,” Dad clarified. “Does she know what happened that night? In the ice storm?”
“She knows he died, Dad. On the job. Everyone knows.”
He was quiet on the line for a long time.
“That’s not what I asked,” he said.
—
### Chapter Nine: The Ice Storm
He shared the story that night. He drove over to Bolivar after dinner and sat at our kitchen table with both of us. Josh and me.
He had never disclosed it to anyone. Not in eighteen years. Not even my mother.
January 13th, 2007. The ice storm.
By then, Dad was a crew foreman. He had been with the co-op for twenty years. Ray Meeks was part of his crew. Ray was thirty-four. He had been a lineman for nine years. Dad trained him personally when Ray joined as an apprentice in 1998.
“He was good,” Dad recounted. “Real good. Careful. Smart. He would have been a foreman himself in a few years.”
They had been working for thirty-one hours straight. Half of Dallas County had no power. The ice was two inches thick on every line. Trees were falling everywhere like gunfire.
Around two in the morning, they received a call about a farmhouse on Route 32 north of town. An elderly man on home oxygen. His backup generator had failed. His daughter was on the phone with dispatch, crying.
“I sent Ray up,” Dad said. “I sent him up the pole. I was on the ground holding the light. It was my call.”
He paused. He looked down at the kitchen table.
“I didn’t see the limb,” he said. “A large red oak. Coated in ice. Hanging over the line. I should have seen it. It was my responsibility to see it. I was the foreman.”
Josh sat very still across the table.
“The limb fell on the line,” Dad said. “Right where Ray was working. It took the line and the crossarm and Ray with it.”
No one in my kitchen breathed.
“I climbed up,” Dad said. “To retrieve him. The pole was still standing. I don’t know how. I climbed up in the ice with my spikes and got him down. He was still alive when I brought him to the ground.”
He looked at Josh.
“He asked about you,” he said quietly. “And your sister. And your mom. He said, tell Cindy I’m sorry I missed supper.”
Josh made a sound I had never heard him make.
“He died in the ambulance,” Dad continued. “Halfway to Springfield. I rode with him. I held his hand.”
He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“The co-op investigated,” he explained. “They determined it was an accident. No one’s fault. The storm. The ice.” He shook his head. “But I was the foreman. I sent him up. I didn’t see the limb. And I never told your mother. I attended the funeral and stood in the back, and I never once told her I was the one who sent him up there.”
“Is that why?” Josh asked. His voice was thick. “Is that why you… when I was sixteen? The fishing? The Cardinals games?”
Dad nodded slowly.
“I owed him,” he said. “I couldn’t return him to you. But I thought I could at least be present.”
He looked at Josh.
“And then you turned out to be a good man,” he said. “Like him. And I didn’t owe anybody anything anymore. I just loved you.”
Josh buried his face in his hands.
I reached across the table and took my father’s hand. It was trembling again.
“Dad,” I said. “Why are you telling us now?”
He gazed at me for a long time.
“Because I heard what they’re saying at the café,” he said. “About Cindy raising that boy all by herself. About me stealing her birthday.” He took a breath. “And she’s right, Kayla. She did raise him by herself. Because of me.”
He stood up.
“I’m going to see her,” he stated. “Tomorrow. And I’m going to tell her.”
—
### Chapter Ten: What Leon Told Her
He went on a Sunday afternoon. After church.
He asked us to accompany him. Not to speak. Just to be there. “In case she throws something,” he said. He almost smiled.
We drove out to Hickory Street in two cars. Dad in his old Silverado. Josh and I in ours. When we arrived, Cindy was sitting on her porch swing with a glass of iced tea. The wind chimes were ringing.
She noticed Dad’s truck and stood up.
When she saw Josh’s truck behind it, she sat back down.
Dad walked up her front walk. Slowly. He had put on his blue button-up shirt. The one from the reunion. Washed and ironed. I don’t know if he did that intentionally.
He paused at the bottom of her porch steps.
“Cindy,” he said.
“Leon.”
“Can I sit?”
She regarded him for a long moment. Then she nodded toward the porch chair across from the swing.
He ascended the steps and sat down. Josh and I remained at the bottom of the steps, by the carport. She didn’t instruct us to leave.
Dad reached up and touched his right ear. The new hearing aid. Then his left.
“I can hear you now,” he said. “Real good. These are better than the old ones.”
“I heard,” Cindy replied. Her tone was flat.
“I want to tell you something,” Dad continued. “Something I should have disclosed eighteen years ago. And I want you to hear the entire story before you respond. Can you do that?”
She didn’t reply. But she didn’t get up either.
He shared everything.
The thirty-one hours. The farmhouse on Route 32 and the elderly man on oxygen. Sending Ray up the pole. The red oak limb he failed to notice. Climbing up in the ice to retrieve him.
Tell Cindy I’m sorry I missed supper.
The ambulance. Halfway to Springfield. Holding Ray’s hand.
Cindy remained motionless the entire time. She sat on her porch swing with her glass of iced tea in both hands, the wind chimes ringing, and her face shifted from red to white to something I had never seen on her before.
When Dad reached the part about the ambulance, the glass slipped from her hands. It fell on the porch boards and shattered. Iced tea spilled everywhere.
She didn’t even acknowledge it.
“I was the foreman,” Dad said. “It was my decision. I’ve carried that burden every day for eighteen years. I never told you because I was a coward. I feared you’d despise me. I thought you’d have every right to.”
He leaned forward in the porch chair.
“And when Josh began coming around,” he said, “I thought, perhaps I can do something. Maybe I can be there for this boy, because I took his daddy from him. I never intended to take your place, Cindy. I never wanted to. I merely wanted to give back a fraction of what I took.”
Cindy stared at him.
“You were there,” she whispered. “When he died.”
“I held his hand.”
“He said…” Her voice faltered. “He said he was sorry he missed supper.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She covered her face with both hands.
“I prepared meatloaf,” she sobbed through her fingers. “That night. I kept it warm in the oven. Until four in the morning. I kept thinking he’d return home. And then the co-op called.”
She wept. Big, gasping, ugly sobs. On her porch swing with forty wind chimes ringing above her.
Josh ascended the steps. He sat on the swing next to his mother. He wrapped his arm around her.
She turned and buried her face against his shoulder and cried.
Dad sat in the porch chair across from them. He remained silent. He just sat there, tears streaming down his face as well.
After a long time, Cindy lifted her head.
She looked at Dad. Her face was a mess. Mascara everywhere. She appeared older than I had ever seen her.
“I pushed you,” she said. “Off the dock. In front of everyone.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t a joke,” she stated. “Not really. I was angry with you. You were standing there on the dock, and Josh was up the hill, and he had just told me that morning that he was going to Cardinals opening day next April with you. Just you two. Like every year.” She shook her head. “And I thought, he’s taking my son. He’s always been taking my son. And I just…” She paused. “I placed my hands on your back.”
“I know,” Dad replied again.
“You knew?”
“I felt you lean into it,” he said softly. “A joke’s a little shove. You leaned.”
—
### Chapter Eleven: The Claim
Cindy came to our house on Tuesday night.
She had never visited our house without calling first. She had never come to our house without Josh inviting her. She stood on our front porch in Bolivar at seven o’clock in the evening, holding a manila envelope.
“Kayla,” she said. “Can I come in?”
I let her inside.
She sat at our kitchen table. The same table where Dad shared the ice storm story. Josh entered from the garage and paused in the doorway when he saw her.
She opened the envelope. She retrieved a stack of papers.
“I contacted my insurance agent,” she said. “Gary Pfeiffer. At Farm Bureau. Yesterday.” She looked at me. “You knew, didn’t you? About the liability coverage?”
“I knew,” I replied. “I didn’t want to force you to do it.”
“I know you didn’t.” She slid the papers across the table. “So I handled it myself.”
It was a claim form. Completed in her loopy handwriting.
Under Description of Incident, she had written:
On July 12, at a family reunion at my brother-in-law’s farm pond, I intentionally pushed Leon Pruitt off a dock into the water. It was not an accident. His hearing aids were lost. I am responsible.
“Gary advised me not to write intentionally,” she said. “He said they might not pay if it was on purpose. He suggested I write that I bumped him by accident.”
“What did you say?” Josh inquired.
“I said I’m done lying about it,” Cindy stated.
She pulled out another paper. A letter from Farm Bureau. Dated that afternoon.
They had approved the claim anyway. Gary Pfeiffer had driven out to see the adjuster himself and argued that a fifty-nine-year-old woman shoving a family member off a dock at a reunion as a prank was horseplay, not an intentional act to cause harm. The adjuster concurred. Personal liability coverage. No deductible.
A check for four thousand one hundred dollars. The value of the original hearing aids. Made out to Leon Pruitt.
“I delivered it to him this morning,” Cindy said. “Leon signed it over. To you two.” She slid it across the table. “He said to tell you it’s family money.”
I glanced at the check. Then at my mother-in-law.
“Cindy,” I said. “Your premium is going to increase. For three years, likely. Because of this claim.”
“I know,” she replied. “Gary informed me. About two hundred a year.” She almost laughed. “I believe that’s cheaper than a cruise.”
Then she pulled out one more item from the envelope.
A brochure. Carnival Cruise Line. Galveston to Cozumel. Five nights.
“I’m not going,” she said. “Not on that money. That money is for Leon’s ears. It always was.”
“Mom…”
“But,” she said, looking at Josh, “I’d like to go. Someday. For my sixtieth. If you’ll still take me.” She turned the brochure over. “I’ll pay my half. I’ve saved a little. And I’ll need a cabin mate.”
“Who?” Josh asked.
Cindy gazed at the table for a long time.
“I was thinking,” she said slowly, “I’d ask your sister. And Kayla.” She looked up at me. “If you’d want to join. A girls’ trip. Me and my girls.”
I was at a loss for words. I sat at my kitchen table, looking at the woman who had informed forty people at my rehearsal dinner that I was pregnant. Who placed a whoopee cushion on Aunt Opal. Who pushed my father off a dock.
Who kept a meatloaf warm in the oven until four in the morning, waiting for a man who never returned home.
“I’d like that, Cindy,” I said.
She nodded. She couldn’t speak.
The following Thursday, at Shear Elegance, Cindy shared the truth with everyone.
Tammy’s sister-in-law was present. She informed Tammy, who then told me. Cindy sat in the chair with foils in her hair and recounted the entire beauty shop. The reunion. The dock. Leaning into it. The hearing aids. The cruise money. Leon.
She didn’t mention the ice storm. That was hers. And Dad’s.
But she did share that she was wrong. That Kayla didn’t steal anything. That it was the right thing to do.
“And then she said,” Tammy informed me at the front desk at Dr. Heller’s, “that if anyone ever speaks a bad word about Leon Pruitt in that beauty shop again, she’ll place a whoopee cushion in their chair.”
—
### Chapter Twelve: Next July
The Meeks family reunion occurred again on the second Saturday in July. At Uncle Wade’s farm pond.
Forty-some people. The slip-and-slide. The Bluetooth speaker playing Alan Jackson. Uncle Wade and Josh up the hill at the smoker with the brisket.
Dad attended. This time, he wore a T-shirt. A gray one from the co-op retirees’ fish fry. And swim trunks.
“Figured I’d dress for it this year,” he said.
We went on the cruise in April.
Cindy, Brittany, and I. Five nights out of Galveston on the Carnival Breeze. Balcony cabin. Cozumel and Costa Maya. Cindy wore her large floppy hat and both of her new swimsuits. She got sunburned on the second day and peeled for a week.
On the last night, we sat on the balcony with our feet propped on the railing, sipping piña coladas from plastic pineapples, watching the moon rise over the Gulf.
“Ray always said we’d take a cruise someday,” Cindy reminisced. “When the kids were grown.” She gazed out at the water. “I think he’d enjoy this. The three of us.”
Brittany rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. I reached over and took Cindy’s hand. She held on.
Opening day, Josh and Dad attended the Cardinals game in St. Louis, like every year.
This time, they had three tickets.
Cindy wore a red Cardinals T-shirt she bought at the Walmart in Bolivar. She had never been to a game. She didn’t know the rules. She cheered for the wrong team twice.
Dad sat between her and Josh, explaining every single pitch. She could hear him. He could hear her. They debated the designated hitter for three innings.
Josh texted me a picture from the seventh-inning stretch. All three of them stood up, singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Cindy had her arm around Dad’s.
Now it was July again. At the pond.
Midway through the reunion, the kids began jumping off the dock. Josh’s nieces and nephews, the cousins’ children, a whole crowd of them in swimsuits and life jackets. Cannonballs. Belly flops. Screams of joy.
“Grandpa Leon!” one of them yelled. Cody’s little boy, Bentley. Six years old. “Grandpa Leon, jump with us!”
He’s not anyone’s grandpa. Not yet. But they all call him that.
Dad glanced at the dock. Then at me.
I watched him reach up to his ears. One, then the other. He removed his hearing aids.
Then he walked out onto the dock.
He paused in front of Cindy.
She was standing at the end of the dock, where she had stood last year. Holding a paper plate. Potato salad, a deviled egg, and a slice of watermelon.
Dad extended his hand. The two little hearing aids rested in his palm.
Cindy looked at them. Then at him.
He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t hear her anyway. He just held them out.
Slowly, she set down her paper plate on the dock. She extended both hands, cupped together.
He tipped the hearing aids into them.
Cindy enclosed her hands around them. Gently. As if she were cradling a baby bird. She held them against her chest.
“I’ve got them, Leon,” she said.
He couldn’t hear it. But he read her lips. He’s been reading lips for fifteen years.
He nodded.
Then my sixty-eight-year-old father, who climbed poles for thirty-eight years, who held a dying man’s hand in an ambulance during an ice storm, who never once in his entire life asked anyone for help, turned around and ran down that dock in his swim trunks.
And jumped.
Cannonball. The biggest splash of the day. Brown pond water went everywhere. Bentley squealed with delight. All the kids cheered.
Dad emerged, sputtering, waist-deep in the water beside the dock. Grinning like a child.
Cindy stood at the end of the dock with her hands pressed against her chest. Holding his hearing aids. She was laughing.
Not the laugh from the dock last year. Not the laugh from her front yard.
A different one. Softer. The kind you laugh at when something is genuinely funny, and nobody’s getting hurt.
She looked down at him in the water. Then up the bank at me, standing in the grass in my yellow sundress.
She raised her cupped hands slightly. As if to show me.
See? I’ve got them.
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded.
Up the hill, the brisket was ready. Uncle Wade rang the old dinner bell on the porch. The kids scrambled out of the pond and raced for the tables.
Dad climbed the ladder on the side of the dock. He stood there dripping, basking in the sun.
Cindy opened her hands.
He took his hearing aids back, one at a time, and inserted them. Left, then right.
Then he tilted his head.
Up in the large oak by the pond, something was singing. Mimicking every song it knew. A cardinal. A blue jay. A robin. A whistle, three notes, up and down.
“Listen,” Dad said. “Cindy. Listen to that.”
And they stood together at the end of the dock, a widow and a widower, soaking wet and dry, and listened to a mockingbird perform.