On Thursday, they fitted the new hearing aids.
Dr. Nguyen put them in Dad’s ears in her little exam room with the pictures of mountains on the walls. She plugged them into her computer and adjusted the settings while Dad sat very still in the chair, hands folded in his lap.
“Mr. Lowery,” she said in her normal voice. “Can you hear me?”
Dad’s whole face changed.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. And for the first time in five days, he said it at a normal volume. He didn’t have to shout.
“How does my voice sound?”
“Sounds like you.” He laughed, and his voice cracked. “Sounds just like you.”
Dr. Nguyen spent half an hour showing him how to charge them, how to clean them, and how to connect them to his phone. Then she showed him something new.
“These have a ‘find my hearing aid’ feature on your phone,” she said. “If you ever lose one, the app can show you the last place it was connected.”
“Wouldn’t have helped in the pond,” Dad said dryly.
Dr. Nguyen laughed. “No. But you might want to keep them out of ponds from now on.”
“Wasn’t my idea to go in,” he said.
At the front desk, I asked about one more thing. I’d called Mr. Kessler at Farm Bureau again on Wednesday.
“You can add the new hearing aids to your dad’s homeowner’s policy as scheduled personal property,” he’d told me. “Then they’re covered for loss, even if they get dropped in a pond. It’ll cost him about forty dollars a year. All I need is the receipt.”
I got a copy of the receipt from the clinic, and that afternoon I emailed it to Mr. Kessler. By Friday the hearing aids were listed by serial number on Dad’s policy, covered for $4,300 against any kind of loss.
I’ll tell you, I’ve never been so happy to pay forty dollars in my life.
When we walked out of the clinic into the parking lot, Dad stopped under the oak trees along the sidewalk.
He tilted his head.
“What kind of bird is that?”
I listened. Up in the oak tree, a mockingbird was going through every song it knew: a cardinal, a blue jay, a robin, the squeak of a gate, something that sounded almost like a car alarm. Over and over, running through its whole list, one song after another.
“It’s a mockingbird, Daddy.”
“A mockingbird,” he repeated softly.
He stood there in the parking lot of a medical building on South National Avenue, in his pressed white shirt and his good khakis, with his head tilted back and his eyes closed, listening like it was the first bird God ever made.
I had to look at the pavement for a minute.
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.
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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