Josh didn’t answer right away. He looked out at the yard for a long time, at the clothesline, the swing set we’d put up for the nephews, the garden with its rows of green beans.
I’d spent the morning doing what I do at work. I’d made phone calls and gotten the facts.
First I called Dad’s homeowner’s insurance agent, a nice man named Mr. Kessler at the Farm Bureau office in Ozark. I asked whether Dad’s policy would cover the hearing aids.
“I’m sorry, Kayla,” he said. “Unless he’d added them to his policy as scheduled personal property, a standard homeowner’s policy generally doesn’t cover something just being lost in a pond. It covers things like fire and theft. Dropping something in the water isn’t one of the covered causes. I wish I had better news.”
Then I called the audiology clinic in Springfield. The office manager confirmed that the loss and damage warranty on Dad’s pair had expired six months earlier. A new comparable pair would run between $4,000 and $4,500, depending on the model. They offered financing through a medical credit card, at zero interest for twelve months but twenty-six percent after that.
I knew all about those medical credit cards from work. I’ve seen them swallow older patients whole.
Then, God help me, I looked up the small claims court rules in Missouri. You can sue someone in small claims for up to $5,000 without a lawyer. The filing fee in Greene County is around forty dollars. I could have filed against Cindy for the full $4,100, and I had forty witnesses.
I sat at my kitchen table and imagined it. Me and Dad on one side of a courtroom. Cindy on the other, in her coral lipstick. Josh in the middle, having to testify about his own mother.
I closed the laptop.
“I’m not suing your mother,” I told Josh on the steps. “I thought about it. I looked it up. But I’m not putting you through that. And Dad would never forgive me.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”
“But I’m not letting him go deaf again either. He can’t afford it, Josh. He’s on a fixed income. His pension from the co-op is eighteen hundred a month, and his Social Security is about fourteen hundred. His property taxes and his supplement premium alone eat up a big chunk of that. He’d put it on one of those twenty-six percent cards before he’d ask me for help. Or he’d just go without. He went without for ten years before.”
Josh still didn’t say anything.
“The cruise money is ours,” I said. “We saved it. We earned it. And your mother is the reason my dad can’t hear the phone ring.”
Josh set down his beer.
“It was ours to give,” he said finally, still looking at the yard. “Do it.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.
Then he said something that made me love him more than I already did.
“And I’ll tell Mom myself.”
“Josh, you don’t have to…”
“Yes, I do.” He turned and looked at me. His eyes were wet. “She pushed your father into a pond, Kayla. Then she laughed at him. And I stood there with a pair of barbecue tongs and didn’t say a single word to her because forty people were watching.” He shook his head. “I’m thirty-six years old. I’m done being scared of my mother.”
I put my head on his shoulder. We sat there until the fireflies came out over the soybeans.
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