Josh was up the hill helping Uncle Gene with the brisket when it happened. He heard the splash and the silence after it and came running down through the pecan trees with a pair of barbecue tongs still in his hand.
By the time he reached the dock, I already had Dad out of the water.
“What happened?” Josh said, breathing hard. “Leon, you okay?”
“He can’t hear you,” I said. “His hearing aids are gone.”
Josh looked at Dad, soaking wet and patting his ears. Then he looked at the dock.
His mother was still standing at the end of it with her paper plate, her coral lipstick perfect, her hair sprayed into its usual blond helmet.
“It was a joke, Joshie,” Cindy said, and laughed. “I didn’t push him that hard. How was I supposed to know he had those things in? Everybody takes their stuff out before they go near the water.”
“He wasn’t going near the water, Mom. He was standing on the dock.”
“Well, he should’ve been more careful.”
Josh’s face went tight. I watched him swallow whatever he wanted to say. Forty relatives were watching, and that’s a lot of eyes on a man about to yell at his mother at his own family reunion.
I knew what everybody was thinking, because I was thinking it too. Nobody calls the sheriff over a family reunion. Nobody calls a lawyer because somebody’s mother-in-law got silly on a dock. She was Josh’s mother. If this got fixed, it would have to be fixed by us.
“Let’s find them,” Josh said.
He kicked off his shoes, rolled up his jeans, and waded into the pond. Two of his cousins, Tyler and Brent, followed him in without being asked. All afternoon and into the evening, the three of them walked the bottom of that pond with their bare feet, shuffling slowly through the mud in a line, feeling for anything small and hard.
The water was murky and brown, about five feet deep at the end of the dock. Somebody brought a rake from the barn. Uncle Gene brought a big flashlight when the sun started going down.
They found a fishing lure, a beer can from probably 1985, and a kid’s flip-flop.
Not the hearing aids.
While they searched, I sat with Dad on a hay bale by the barn. Josh’s Aunt Peggy brought him a dry flannel shirt and a towel, and he changed behind the barn and came back with his wet shirt folded neatly over his arm, because that’s my father. Even in the worst moment, he folds his shirt.
He sat beside me and stared at the pond.
I knew those hearing aids. Dad had bought them three and a half years earlier at an audiology clinic in Springfield. They were good ones, rechargeable, with Bluetooth so he could hear phone calls right in his ears. He’d paid $4,100 for the pair, out of his savings, in cash.
I’d gone with him that day. I’d read the paperwork, because I read everyone’s paperwork. The price included a three-year loss and damage warranty: if they were lost, stolen, or damaged, the manufacturer would replace them once for a small deductible.
The warranty ran out at three years.
He’d had them three and a half.
And Medicare doesn’t pay for hearing aids. Not one dime. I deal with insurance every day, and that’s the rule that makes my patients the angriest. Original Medicare covers a hearing test if your doctor orders it, but not the hearing aids themselves. Dad has Original Medicare and a supplement plan, and none of it would help him.
So my father, a widower living on his co-op pension and Social Security, had just lost $4,100 he couldn’t get back, because my mother-in-law thought it would be funny.
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