Part One: The Dock
Halfway through the Meeks family reunion, my mother-in-law shoved my sixty-eight-year-old father off the dock.
Afterward she called it a joke. She said so about a hundred times.
I was standing three feet away when it happened. I watched her palms land flat against his back. I watched her lean in. I watched Dad’s arms fly out, the way a man’s arms do when the ground isn’t where he left it.
Then he was in the water. He surfaced sputtering, waist-deep in the murky brown pond beside the dock.
Uncle Wade’s farm pond covers maybe an acre and a half, out past Buffalo, Missouri, in a dip between two hayfields. Cattle drink from it. In July it’s the color of chocolate milk, with a slick of green along the edges and a soft mud bottom that swallows your feet to the ankle.
His light blue button-up was soaked to the chest. It was the one he wore to church. He’d put it on because this was a family occasion and he wanted to look nice. The water reached past his belt buckle, and pond water ran out of his gray hair and down his face as he stood there blinking.
His hand went to his left ear. Then to his right. Nothing there.
Forty people went quiet all at once. Cousins, aunts, uncles and kids had been scattered across Uncle Wade’s yard on lawn chairs, blankets and pickup tailgates. A few seconds earlier there’d been music from somebody’s Bluetooth speaker, kids shrieking on the slip-and-slide, and the smell of brisket smoking up on the hill. Now there was only the speaker playing Alan Jackson to nobody, the cicadas, and my father standing in the pond with both hands pressed over his empty ears.
Cindy stood on the dock behind me, still holding her paper plate with its potato salad, deviled egg and slice of watermelon. She hadn’t even set 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 cooling off. You should’ve taken them out.” Somebody on the bank laughed, one of the teenage cousins, and then stopped. Dad looked up at her from the water. He saw her mouth moving. He couldn’t hear a word.
I didn’t think. I dropped to my knees on that dock in my yellow sundress, the one I’d bought at Dillard’s for the reunion because I wanted to look nice too. The boards were rough and wet and scraped my knees. I reached down for his hand. “Dad,” I said. “Dad, here. Take my hand.”
He looked at my face. He couldn’t hear me, but he could read my lips. He’s been reading my lips since I was a baby. He took my hand.
His hand was shaking. My father’s hands don’t shake.
He’s sixty-eight. His name is Leon Pruitt, and he climbed poles for the Southwest Electric Cooperative for thirty-eight years, through ice storms, tornadoes and summer heat that would cook you inside your rubber gloves. He’s hung from a pole in a lightning storm with forty thousand volts three feet from his face and never once lost his footing. He doesn’t fall in ponds. He doesn’t stand in water with his hands over his ears, looking lost.
I pulled. He got one foot onto the bottom rung of the old wooden ladder Uncle Wade had nailed to the side of the dock, then the other. Water poured off him. His good church shoes squelched. I got him up onto the boards, and he stood there dripping. He looked down at me, then back at the water, at the spot where he’d gone in.
“They’re gone, sis,” he said. Too loud. Way too loud. Everybody heard it. “They fell out. They’re gone.”
Josh had been up the hill helping his uncle with the brisket. He’d been there an hour with Uncle Wade and the big black offset smoker Wade built from an old propane tank. Josh was slicing the first brisket when the yard went silent. He looked down the hill and saw my father on the dock, soaking wet.
By the time he got down there, I already had Dad out of the water. He came across the yard at a dead run, still holding the brisket knife, and stopped at the end of the dock, breathing hard. “What happened?”
I didn’t answer. I looked at his mother.
Cindy still stood there with her plate. A few cousins had drifted onto the dock, and one of the aunts wrapped Dad in a beach towel with a cartoon shark on it. “It was a joke, Joshie,” Cindy said. “For heaven’s sake. Everybody’s acting like I shot him.”
Josh looked at her. Then he looked at my dad, wrapped in a shark towel, hands still lifting to his ears every few seconds as if he couldn’t believe they were really empty.
“His hearing aids,” I said quietly. “They were in.”
Josh closed his eyes. He understood what they meant. 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 made the crews wear earplugs after about 1995, but by then it was too late. When he retired he couldn’t hear the phone ring. He couldn’t hear the TV unless it was loud enough to make the neighbors complain.
For three years after retiring he simply stopped hearing things. He quit church because he couldn’t hear the sermon. He quit the café in the morning because he couldn’t follow the men at the table. He sat alone in his house in Buffalo. Then, three and a half years ago, I made him see an audiologist, and I drove him there myself. The day they fitted 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 of his cousins, Travis and Cody, searched the pond bottom until dark. They stripped down to swim trunks and waded out to where Dad went in. They walked a slow grid, side by side, feeling the bottom with their toes. The mud came to their shins and the water to their chests.
They found a fishing lure, a green plastic worm probably lost by Uncle Wade around 1994. They found a beer can and a flip-flop. They found a rock that Cody swore felt exactly like a hearing aid until he pulled it up. They did not find the hearing aids.
I knew they wouldn’t. I knew it from the first minute.
I’m the office manager at Dr. Heller’s dental office on Main Street in Bolivar. I handle insurance, billing, scheduling and patient complaints, and part of the job is knowing what equipment costs and what destroys it. I know what water does to anything with a battery. Even if they’d found them, they’d have been finished within minutes.
Dad had paid four thousand, one hundred dollars for that pair. I knew because I helped him write the check. He’d been saving for two years from his co-op pension and Social Security, fifty dollars here and a hundred there, in a coffee can in his kitchen. He carried the can into the audiologist’s office and counted it out on the counter.
The pair had come with a three-year loss and damage warranty. It ran out six months ago. And Medicare doesn’t pay a dime for hearing aids. People don’t believe me when I say so, but Original Medicare doesn’t cover them, or the exams to fit them. Dad’s supplement plan through the co-op retirees’ group doesn’t either.
You can buy over-the-counter ones now at Walmart or the pharmacy, for a few hundred dollars. But those are for mild loss. Dad’s is severe. The audiologist told us that on the first day. He needed real prescription ones, fitted to his ears. Four thousand dollars, or back to hearing nothing.
As it got dark, Dad sat on the bank in a lawn chair wrapped in the shark towel, watching the boys wade the pond. He hadn’t said much in two hours. When people spoke to him, he just nodded. I sat in the grass beside his chair, and he leaned toward me.
“Don’t make trouble with her on my account, sis,” he said.
Too loud. Half the reunion heard him. Cindy, at the picnic table with her sisters, looked over. Then she looked away and laughed at something one of them said.
I didn’t say a word to Cindy all day. Not when she came over at the cars and told my dad, “No hard feelings, Leon, okay? You know me.” Not when she hugged Josh and said, “Your father-in-law needs a sense of humor.” I just 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 stiff and stared out at the hayfields going by in the dark. He said nothing the whole way. He couldn’t hear the radio, so I turned it off.
I need to tell you about my mother-in-law, so you understand.
Cindy Meeks is fifty-nine. She works the register at the Dollar General in Buffalo four days a week and gets her hair done every Thursday at Shear Elegance on Ash Street. She’s loud and funny and the life of every party. She’s also the kind of person who thinks the funniest thing in the world is somebody else being embarrassed.
At our rehearsal dinner, she told forty people I was pregnant. I wasn’t. She thought it was hilarious. My grandmother cried. At Thanksgiving two years ago, she put a whoopee cushion on the chair of Josh’s ninety-year-old great-aunt. Aunt Opal sat on it, everyone laughed, and Aunt Opal went red to her hairline and left before pie. At a baby shower for Josh’s cousin Brittany, she wrapped an empty box in pretty paper with a bow. When Brittany opened it, Cindy said, “That’s what you’ll have left of your social life!” and laughed so hard she had to sit down.
“She’s not mean, Kayla,” Josh always says. “She just doesn’t know when to stop.” I’m not sure there’s a difference.
Josh’s father died when Josh was eleven. Ray Meeks was a lineman too, at the same co-op as my dad. He died in the ice storm of January 2007, the big one that took down power lines from Joplin to St. Louis. He was working a night shift north of Buffalo, restoring power to a farmhouse where an old man on oxygen waited inside. A tree limb came down on the line he was working. Josh doesn’t talk about it much, and neither does Cindy.
Cindy raised Josh and his sister alone on a cashier’s paycheck and Ray’s co-op life insurance. I know it was hard. And I know that when Josh was sixteen and started dating me, my dad was the first grown man who took any real interest in him. Dad taught him to fish. He took him to Cardinals games in St. Louis. When Josh’s truck broke down, Dad crawled under it with him. When Josh wanted to marry me, he asked my dad first, on Dad’s front porch, and Dad told me later that he cried after Josh drove away.
Josh calls him Leon, but he looks at him the way some men look at their fathers. Cindy noticed. Of course she noticed.
Here’s what I hadn’t told anyone, not even my dad. Josh and I had been putting away two hundred and fifty dollars a month for eighteen months in a separate account at Mid-Missouri Bank, tagged in the banking app: MOM’S CRUISE. Four thousand, five hundred dollars. It was for Cindy’s sixtieth birthday next spring: five nights out of Galveston, Cozumel and Costa Maya, a balcony cabin. She’d never been on a cruise. She’d never really been anywhere. Branson, once. Eureka Springs.
It was Josh’s idea. He felt his mother had given up everything for him and his sister, and he wanted to give her something big. We meant to surprise her at Christmas with a little plastic boat in a box. But Josh’s sister Brittany let it slip at Easter, and Cindy had been telling all of Shear Elegance ever since. A balcony cabin. Two new swimsuits from the JCPenney in Springfield and a big floppy hat. She’d been telling everyone at the reunion, too, right before she pushed my dad off the dock.
Sunday evening, Josh and I sat on our back steps. We live in a little brick ranch house in Bolivar, thirty minutes from Buffalo, with three bedrooms, a chain-link fence and a maple in the backyard with a tire swing Josh hung for the nieces and nephews. It was hot and still, and fireflies were rising out of the grass. Josh handed me a beer. I didn’t drink it.
I’d spent most of the day on the phone and my laptop, doing what I do at work every day: figuring out who pays for what.
“I called the audiologist,” I said. “In Springfield. The one who fitted Dad’s first pair.” Josh nodded. “The warranty expired in January. There’s nothing they can do on the old ones.” I took a breath. “A new pair of the same model is four thousand, three hundred. Prices went up.”
“Okay.”
“Medicare won’t pay. His supplement won’t pay. I called them both.” Josh looked out at the tire swing. “I looked into one other thing. Your mom’s homeowner’s insurance.”
Josh turned to me.
“Most homeowner’s policies have personal liability coverage,” I said carefully. “If you damage somebody else’s property by accident, it pays. Like hitting a baseball through the neighbor’s window. Or pushing somebody into a pond and ruining their hearing aids.”
“Kayla…”
“I’m not saying we should. I’m just saying it exists. Somebody would have to file a claim against her policy. Dad would have to file it. Or she would.”
Josh was quiet for a long time.
“Dad would never,” I said. “You heard him. Don’t make trouble with her on my account.”
“And Mom would never admit she did anything wrong,” Josh said.
“No.”
We sat with that. A whip-poor-will started up somewhere down the road. Then I said it.
“I want to spend it on Dad.”
Josh didn’t move.
“The cruise money,” I said. “I want to take it out 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 know she’s been telling everybody. I know it’ll be a mess. But Josh, he can’t hear. He’s in his house in Buffalo right now, alone, and he can’t hear the TV or the phone or anything. And he’s never going to ask anybody for help.”
Josh stared at the yard for a long time. At the tire swing. At the maple. At the fireflies lifting out of the grass.
I thought he was going to say no. I thought he was going to say, it’s my mom, Kayla. It’s her birthday. We promised.
Part Two: The Sound of Mockingbirds
“It was ours to give,” he said finally. “Do it.” I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.
Then he said something else. “And I’ll tell Mom myself.”
“Josh, you don’t have to…”
“Yes, I do,” he said, setting his beer 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 dad.” His voice went tight. “And then she told him to lighten up.”
He stood. “I’m not going to let you be the one who tells her. She’ll make it about you. She’ll make you the bad guy. I know how she works.” He looked down at me. “It’s my money too. It’s my mom. I’ll tell her.”
Monday morning I took a personal day and drove to Buffalo for Dad. I’d called Dr. Heller at seven and told her I had a family emergency. She didn’t ask questions. She’s been my boss for nine years.
Dad was waiting on his front porch in a clean plaid shirt, not the blue one, which I think was still drying on the line out back. All I’d texted him was: Picking you up at 8. Wear shoes. He had no idea where we were going.
He climbed into the car and looked at me. “Where to, sis?” Too loud.
I held up the legal pad I’d brought, with the first page lettered in big black marker: SPRINGFIELD. HEARING AIDS. He read it and looked at me. “Kayla,” he said. “No.” I flipped the page to the next: ALREADY MADE THE APPOINTMENT.
“I can’t afford it,” he said. “You know I can’t. I’ll get the cheap ones. At the Walmart.” I flipped again: AUDIOLOGIST SAID NO. TOO WEAK FOR YOU. His jaw worked as he stared out the windshield. “I’ll save up,” he said. “Like last time.” I flipped to a blank page, grabbed the pen from the cup holder and wrote fast: IT’LL TAKE 2 YEARS. YOU’LL BE ALONE IN THAT HOUSE FOR 2 YEARS. He read it. He said nothing more. 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 maybe forty, with dark hair in a bun and kind eyes, and 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.” He nodded, embarrassed. “Come on back.”
She tested him again, forty-five minutes in a little soundproof booth, pressing a button at every beep. His hearing had worsened, not by a lot, but some. Dr. Patel showed me the chart afterward, a line sloping down and down like a ski run.
“Severe to profound in the high frequencies,” she said. “Moderately severe in the lows. He needs power. The over-the-counter devices top out at mild to moderate loss. They’d be like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg.” She recommended the newer version of his old model, with better feedback control, Bluetooth to stream phone calls straight into his ears, and a rechargeable battery. “No more little batteries to fiddle with. His hands were having a hard time with those last time.”
“How much?”
“Four thousand, three hundred,” she said. “That includes the fitting, three years of follow-ups, and a three-year loss and damage warranty.” She hesitated. “I’ll be honest, Mrs. Meeks. I’d recommend a waterproof case and a clip. After this.”
I wrote the check at the front desk, out of the account with the tag that said MOM’S CRUISE. Four thousand, three hundred dollars. That left two hundred. I folded the receipt into my purse. Dad stood beside me watching, saying nothing, his face very red.
Out in the hot parking lot, he wouldn’t get in the car. He stood at the passenger door with his hands in his pockets. “That’s your money, Kayla,” he said, too loud. A woman walking into the building turned to look. “That’s your and Josh’s money. I saw the account. I saw what it said on there.” I hadn’t known he’d seen. “That’s Cindy’s cruise. I can’t take Cindy’s cruise. Not after all this. She’ll never forgive you. She’ll never forgive Josh.”
I opened my legal pad on the hood, so hot I could feel it through the cardboard backing, and wrote slowly in big letters so he could read every word. IT’S FAMILY MONEY. YOU’RE FAMILY. His face did something. His chin began to shake. I flipped to a new page and wrote one more line. AND JOSH SAID YES BEFORE I EVEN FINISHED ASKING.
Dad looked 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 in the car.
They fitted the new ones Thursday. I took another half day, and Dr. Heller just raised an eyebrow and said, “Go.” The fitting took an hour. Dr. Patel put them in his ears, connected them to her computer with a little cable and adjusted the settings. She’d say words, Baseball. Sidewalk. Hot dog, and he’d repeat them back.
At the end, she sat back. “Mr. Pruitt,” she said, in a normal voice. Not loud. Not slow. He turned his head fast, like somebody had touched him. “How does that sound?” He sat there with his mouth a little open. “I can hear you,” he said, at a normal volume, for the first time since the reunion.
She gave him a little black charging case and a waterproof clip with a lanyard so he could pin the aids to his collar when he took them out, plus a card with her number in case anything went wrong. “If anybody pushes you in a pond again,” she said, “take them out first.” Dad laughed. Then he looked at me, and I knew he was hearing his own laugh. I could see it on his face.
Out in the parking lot, he stopped under the trees. A row of Bradford pears lines the edge of the lot, the kind the city plants everywhere. The air smelled like asphalt and cut grass. Dad stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and tilted his head. “What kind of bird is that?”
I listened. I hadn’t even noticed. A mockingbird, up in one of the pear trees, running through every song it knew. A cardinal. A blue jay. A robin. Something like a car alarm, which town mockingbirds do now. Then a whistle, three notes, up and down. “It’s a mockingbird, Dad,” I said. “It’s copying other birds.”
He didn’t answer. He stood under the pear tree with his head tilted up and his hands at his sides, listening like it was the first bird God ever made. I had to look at the pavement for a minute.
He’d heard birds before. He’d worn hearing aids for three and a half years. But I think for five days he’d believed he’d never hear one again. I think he’d sat in his house in Buffalo with the TV on mute and decided this was the rest of his life. And now here was a mockingbird in a pear tree in a Springfield parking lot, singing like it was putting on a show just for him.
“Your mother used to say they sing all night in May,” Dad said, his voice thick. “Kept her up. 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 died six years ago, pancreatic cancer, at sixty-one. I’d never heard that story. “She’d have liked this one,” he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “This one’s a real show-off.”
On the drive home he talked the whole forty-five minutes, about the co-op, about Mom, about the 2007 ice storm 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 stopping mid-sentence to listen to the turn signal, the tires, the radio I’d turned on low, a George Strait song. “I can hear the fiddle,” he said. “Kayla. Listen. You can hear the fiddle.” I could hear it too. I’d never noticed it before either.
I dropped him in Buffalo at four. He waved from his porch as I backed out of the driveway. Then, as I pulled away, he called something. I rolled down the window. “What, Dad?” “I said thank you,” he said, at a normal volume, from twenty feet away. “I heard myself say it.”
Saturday, Josh drove out to his mother’s place, and I rode along. He didn’t want me to at first. He said he’d handle it. But I told him I wasn’t letting him walk into that alone either.
Cindy lives in the house Josh grew up in, a little white two-bedroom on Hickory Street on the edge of Buffalo, with a carport, 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, and the chimes were going crazy.
She came down her porch steps to meet us in the yard, in capris and a T-shirt that said LIFE IS BETTER AT THE LAKE, her hair freshly done, a big smile on her face. “There’s my boy,” she said, and held out her arms. Josh didn’t hug her. Her arms came down slowly. She looked at him, then at me by the truck. “Well,” she said. “What’s wrong with you two? You look like somebody died.”
Josh took a breath. His hands shook a little at his sides. “Mom,” he said. “There’s no cruise.” She laughed, the same laugh from the dock, light and high and a little too loud. “Very funny.” “It’s not a joke, Mom,” Josh said. “Kayla spent it Monday. On Leon’s ears.”
Cindy looked at me, then at her son. She opened her mouth, and what came out was not what I expected. “On Leon’s ears,” she repeated, quietly, flatly, as if to herself.
“Four thousand, three hundred dollars,” I said. “That’s what they cost. We had four thousand, five hundred saved.”
She stared at me, the wind chimes going behind her, a hundred little bells at once. “You spent my sixtieth birthday,” she said slowly, “on that old man.” “Mom…” “On that deaf old man,” she said, louder. “Who isn’t even yours, Josh. He’s not your father. He’s her father. And you gave him my birthday.”
Josh went white. “Mom, you pushed him in 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 yelling now, her face red. “Everybody knows you take your hearing aids out around water! That’s on him! Not me!” The old man across the street, in a lawn chair, stood up and went inside.
“You told everybody,” Josh said, very quietly. “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 tell them it’s not happening.” Cindy stopped. “That’s what this is about. Isn’t it? Not Leon. Not his ears. You’re embarrassed.”
She didn’t answer. She marched up her porch steps, stopped at the door, and turned back. “He’s always been the one,” she said, her voice shaking. “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 crying now, angry crying. “And I’m the one who raised you, Joshua. By myself. On a cashier’s paycheck. After your father…” She stopped. “I’m the one who stayed. And he gets my birthday.”
She went inside and slammed the door. The wind chimes all rang at once. Josh stood in the yard a long time. I took his hand, cold even in July. “She’s never said that before,” he said. “About Leon. Not once.” “I know.” “I didn’t know she felt like that.” He looked up at the house, the forty wind chimes, the porch swing his father hung in 1998, still hanging. “Let’s go home.”
By Thursday, the whole town knew. That’s how it works in Buffalo, Missouri, population three thousand. Cindy went to Shear Elegance that afternoon as always and told everybody, except it wasn’t the story that happened.
My coworker Tammy told me. Her sister-in-law gets her hair done there on Thursdays too. “She says you stole her cruise,” Tammy said at the front desk at Dr. Heller’s, quietly, so the patients wouldn’t hear. “She says you got Josh to take back her birthday present to pay for your dad’s hearing aids. She says your dad faked being upset to get money out of you. She says it was just a little joke at the reunion, and he made a big deal out of it, and now she’s not going on her cruise, and everybody’s supposed to feel sorry for him.” “Is that what people think?” I asked. Tammy hesitated. “Some of them.”
I wanted to call every woman at Shear Elegance and tell them exactly what happened. The shark towel. The empty ears. The boys wading the pond until dark. But I thought of Dad on the bank, leaning toward me, too loud. Don’t make trouble with her on my account, sis. So I didn’t.
Josh heard it at the feed store, and his cousin Cody told him at the gas station. Somebody posted in the Buffalo Community Facebook group about “people who use their elderly parents to guilt-trip family members out of money.” No names, but everybody knew. Josh read it on his phone at the kitchen table that night, put it face down, and said nothing for a long time. “Should I say something? Tell people what really happened?” “Would it help?” “No. It’d just make two sides. And then everybody’d have to pick one.”
Dad heard it at the café. I hadn’t thought about that. He’d gone back to the Buffalo Café the Tuesday after getting his new hearing aids, for the first time in a week, and sat at the long back table with the retired men like he used to every morning. He heard everything, every word, clear as a bell, better than in fifteen years. Including what Walt Hensley’s wife said to Lois Kemper in the booth behind him.
“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 said nothing to them. He finished his coffee, paid his bill and left a dollar for the waitress. Then he went home and called me, on his phone, which he could now hear through the Bluetooth, straight into his ears. “Sis,” he said. “I need to ask you something. Does Cindy know about Ray?” I didn’t understand. “Josh’s dad. Does she know what happened that night? In the ice storm?” “She knows he died, Dad. On the job. Everybody knows.” He was quiet on the line a long time. “That’s not what I asked,” he said.
He drove to Bolivar after supper and sat at our kitchen table and told us both, Josh and me. He’d never told anyone in eighteen years. Not even my mother.
January 13th, 2007. The ice storm. Dad was a crew foreman by then, twenty years with the co-op. Ray Meeks was on his crew, thirty-four years old, a lineman for nine years. Dad had trained him himself when Ray came on as an apprentice in 1998. “He was good,” Dad said. “Real good. Careful. Smart. He’d have been a foreman himself in a few years.”
They’d been working thirty-one hours straight. Half of Dallas County had no power. Ice lay two inches thick on every line, and trees were coming down like gunshots. Around two in the morning they got a call about a farmhouse on Route 32 north of town. An old man on home oxygen, his backup generator failed, his daughter 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 looked down at the table. “I didn’t see the limb. A big red oak, coated in ice, hanging over the line. I should have seen it. It was my job to see it. I was the foreman.” Josh sat very still. “The limb came down on the line right where Ray was working. It took the line and the crossarm and Ray with it.” Nobody in my kitchen breathed.
“I climbed up to get him down. The pole was still standing. I don’t know how. I climbed up in the ice with my spikes and I got him down. He was still alive when I got him to the ground.” He looked at Josh. “He asked about you. And your sister. And your mom. He said, tell Cindy I’m sorry I missed supper.” Josh made a sound I’d never heard from him.
“He died in the ambulance,” Dad said. “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. They said it was an accident. Nobody’s fault. The storm. The ice. But I was the foreman. I sent him up. I didn’t see the limb. And I never told your mother. I went to the funeral and stood in the back and never once told her I was the one who sent him up there.”
“Is that why?” Josh asked, his voice thick. “When I was sixteen? The fishing? The Cardinals games?” Dad nodded slowly. “I owed him. I couldn’t give him back to you. But I figured I could at least show up.” He looked at Josh. “And then you turned out to be a good man. Like him. And I didn’t owe anybody anything anymore. I just loved you.” Josh put his face in his hands. I reached across the table and took my father’s hand. It was shaking again.
“Dad,” I said. “Why are you telling us now?” He looked at me for a long time. “Because I heard what they’re saying at the café. 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. “I’m going to go see her. Tomorrow. And I’m going to tell her.”
Part Three: What Leon Told Her
He went on a Sunday afternoon, after church. He asked us to come along. Not to talk, just to be there. “In case she throws something,” he said, and almost smiled.
We drove out to Hickory Street in two vehicles, Dad in his old Silverado, Josh and me in ours. When we pulled up, Cindy was on her porch swing with a glass of iced tea, the wind chimes going. She saw Dad’s truck and stood up. She saw Josh’s truck behind it and sat back down.
Dad walked slowly up her front walk. He’d put on his blue button-up, the one from the reunion, washed and ironed. I don’t know if he did that on purpose. He stopped at the bottom of her porch steps. “Cindy.” “Leon.” “Can I sit?” She studied him a long moment, then nodded at the porch chair across from the swing.
He climbed the steps and sat. Josh and I stayed at the bottom by the carport. She didn’t tell us to leave. Dad 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 said flatly.
“I want to tell you something. Something I should’ve told you eighteen years ago. And I want you to hear the whole thing before you say anything. Can you do that?” She didn’t answer, but she didn’t get up either.
He told her all of it. The thirty-one hours. The farmhouse on Route 32 and the old man on oxygen. Sending Ray up the pole. The red oak limb he didn’t see. Climbing up in the ice to bring him down. Tell Cindy I’m sorry I missed supper. The ambulance, halfway to Springfield, and holding Ray’s hand.
Cindy never moved. She sat on the swing with her iced tea in both hands and the wind chimes ringing, and her face went from red to white to something I’d never seen on her. When Dad reached the ambulance, the glass slipped from her hands and broke on the porch boards, iced tea everywhere. She didn’t even look down.
“I was the foreman,” Dad said. “It was my call. I’ve carried that every day for eighteen years. I never told you because I was a coward. I thought you’d hate me. I thought you’d have every right to.” He leaned forward. “And when Josh started coming around, I thought, maybe I can do something. Maybe I can be there for this boy, because I took his daddy from him. I never meant to take your place, Cindy. I never wanted to. I just wanted to give back a little of what I took.”
Cindy stared. “You were there,” she whispered. “When he died.” “I held his hand.” “He said…” Her voice broke. “He said he was sorry he missed supper.” “Yes, ma’am.” She covered her face with both hands. “I made meatloaf,” she said through her fingers. “That night. I kept it warm in the oven until four in the morning. I kept thinking he’d come home. And then the co-op called.”
She sobbed, big, gasping, ugly sobs, on her porch swing with forty wind chimes ringing over her head. Josh climbed the steps and sat beside her and put his arm around her. She turned and pressed her face to his shoulder and cried. Dad sat across from them, silent, tears running down his face too.
After a long time, Cindy lifted her head. Her face was wrecked, mascara everywhere. She looked older than I’d ever seen her. “I pushed you,” she said. “Off the dock. In front of everybody.” “I know.”
“It wasn’t a joke,” she said. “Not really. I was mad at you. You were standing there on the dock, and Josh was up the hill, and he’d just told me that morning 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 stopped. “I put my hands on your back.” “I know,” Dad said again. “You knew?” “I felt you lean into it,” he said quietly. “A joke’s a little shove. You leaned.”
Cindy came to our house Tuesday night. She’d never come without calling first, or without Josh inviting her. She stood on our front porch in Bolivar at seven o’clock, holding a manila envelope. “Kayla,” she said. “Can I come in?”
She sat at our kitchen table, the same one where Dad told us about the ice storm. Josh came in from the garage and stopped in the doorway when he saw her. She pulled a stack of papers from the envelope. “I called my insurance agent. Gary Pfeiffer, at Farm Bureau. Yesterday.” She looked at me. “You knew, didn’t you? About the liability coverage?” “I knew. I didn’t want to make you do it.” “I know you didn’t.” She pushed the papers across. “So I did it myself.”
It was a claim form filled out in her loopy handwriting. Under Description of Incident, she’d 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 said I shouldn’t write intentionally,” she said. “He said they might not pay if it was on purpose. He said write that I bumped him by accident.” “What did you say?” Josh asked. “I said I’m done lying about it.”
She drew out a letter from Farm Bureau dated that afternoon. They’d paid 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 was horseplay, not an act intended to cause harm. The adjuster agreed. 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 took 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 looked at the check, then at my mother-in-law. “Cindy, your premium’s going to go up. For three years, probably.” “I know. Gary told me. About two hundred a year.” She almost laughed. “I figure that’s cheaper than a cruise.”
Then she pulled one more thing from the envelope, a Carnival Cruise Line brochure, Galveston to Cozumel, five nights. “I’m not going. Not on that money. That money’s 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. I’ll pay my half. I’ve got a little put back. And I’ll need a cabin mate.” “Who?” Josh asked. Cindy studied the table. “I was thinking I’d ask your sister. And Kayla.” She looked up at me. “If you’d want to come. A girls’ trip. Me and my girls.”
I didn’t know what to say. I sat in my kitchen looking at the woman who’d told forty people at my rehearsal dinner I was pregnant, who’d put a whoopee cushion under Aunt Opal, who’d pushed my father off a dock. Who’d kept a meatloaf warm in the oven until four in the morning for a man who never came home. “I’d like that, Cindy,” I said. She nodded. She couldn’t speak.
The next Thursday, at Shear Elegance, Cindy told everybody the truth. Tammy’s sister-in-law was there and told Tammy, who told me. Cindy sat in the chair with foils in her hair and told the whole shop about 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 told them she was wrong, that Kayla hadn’t stolen anything, and that it was the right thing to do. “And then she said,” Tammy told me at the front desk, “that if anybody ever says a bad word about Leon Pruitt in that beauty shop again, she’ll put a whoopee cushion in their chair.”
The Meeks family reunion fell on the second Saturday in July again, 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 came in a gray T-shirt from the co-op retirees’ fish fry, and swim trunks. “Figured I’d dress for it this year,” he said.
We took the cruise in April, Cindy, Brittany and me, five nights out of Galveston on the Carnival Breeze. A balcony cabin. Cozumel and Costa Maya. Cindy wore her big floppy hat and both new swimsuits, got sunburned on day two and peeled for a week. On the last night we sat on the balcony with our feet on the railing, drinking piña coladas from plastic pineapples and watching the moon rise over the Gulf.
“Ray always said we’d go on a cruise someday,” Cindy said. “When the kids were grown.” She gazed out at the water. “I think he’d like this. The three of us.” Brittany laid her head on her mother’s shoulder. I reached over and took Cindy’s hand, and she held on.
On opening day, Josh and Dad went to the Cardinals game in St. Louis like every year. This time they had three tickets. Cindy wore a red Cardinals T-shirt from the Walmart in Bolivar. She’d never been to a game and didn’t know the rules, and she cheered for the wrong team twice. Dad sat between her and Josh and explained every pitch. She could hear him. He could hear her. They argued about the designated hitter for three innings. Josh texted me a photo from the seventh-inning stretch, all three standing, singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” Cindy’s arm through Dad’s.
Now it was July again. Halfway through the reunion, the kids started jumping off the dock, nieces and nephews and cousins’ kids in swimsuits and life jackets, cannonballs, belly flops, screaming. “Grandpa Leon!” yelled Cody’s little boy, Bentley, six years old. “Grandpa Leon, jump with us!” He isn’t anybody’s grandpa, not yet, but they all call him that.
Dad looked at the dock, then at me. I watched him reach up to his ears, one and then the other, and take out his hearing aids. He walked out onto the dock and stopped in front of Cindy, who stood at the end where she’d stood last year, holding a paper plate with potato salad, a deviled egg and a slice of watermelon. Dad held out his hand, the two little hearing aids resting in his palm.
Cindy looked at them, then at him. He said nothing. He couldn’t have heard her anyway. He just held them out. Slowly she set her plate down on the dock and cupped both hands together. He tipped the hearing aids into them. She closed her hands around them carefully, like holding a baby bird, and pressed them to 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 in an ice storm, who never once in his life asked anybody for help, turned and ran down that dock in his swim trunks. And jumped.
A cannonball, the biggest splash of the day. Brown pond water flew everywhere. Bentley screamed with joy, and all the kids cheered. Dad surfaced sputtering, waist-deep beside the dock, grinning like a kid. Cindy stood at the end of the dock with her hands against her chest, holding his hearing aids, laughing. Not the laugh from the dock last year, or the one from her front yard. A softer one, the kind you laugh when something is actually 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 a little, as if showing me. See? I’ve got them. I said nothing. I just nodded.
Up the hill, the brisket was ready, and 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 and stood dripping in the sun. Cindy opened her hands. He took his hearing aids back one at a time and put them in, left, then right. Then he tilted his head.
Up in the big oak by the pond, something was singing, running through 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 show off.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real-life themes. Names, characters, places and events are fictionalized, and any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental. Images are for illustration purposes only.
