The sun went down. Josh came out of the pond shaking his head, mud up to his knees.
Dad leaned close to me on the hay bale and spoke too loud, the way he does now when he can’t hear.
“Don’t make trouble with her on my account, sis.”
He’s called me sis since I was little. I don’t know where it came from. My mother used to say it was because he’d wanted a boy and settled for calling me something that sounded like one.
“Daddy…”
“I mean it.” He gripped my hand. His fingers were still cold from the pond. “She’s Josh’s mama. You got to live with these people. I’m just an old man at somebody else’s picnic.”
“You’re not just an old man. You’re my dad.”
He couldn’t hear me. He just patted my hand and nodded, like he understood anyway.
I didn’t say one word to Cindy that day.
I want to be honest about why. It wasn’t because I wasn’t angry. I was so angry my hands were shaking. It was because I knew if I opened my mouth in front of forty Brandts, I wouldn’t be able to stop. And Josh would be the one standing in the middle of it, and Dad would be the reason, and he would hate that more than losing the hearing aids.
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.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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