They’re behind-the-ear aids. Purple, because she picked the color. They have custom earmolds we replace every year as her ears grow, $180 a pair. They run on tiny batteries, size 312, and the battery doors lock with a little tool so a small child can’t swallow anything. Emma’s been changing her own batteries since she was seven.
Chad and I divorced when Emma was five. It wasn’t anybody’s big villain story. We married young. We both worked too much. And somewhere along the way, we stopped talking about anything but bills.
We split the furniture and the friends as fairly as we could. We sat in a mediator’s office in the county courthouse and signed a parenting plan, eleven pages long, and we agreed that Emma came first. Chad pays $612 a month in child support. He’s never been one day late.
He has her every other weekend, Friday after school until Monday morning. On Mondays, he drops her at the school curb on his way to an early shift at the co-op elevator. She hops out before the truck has quite stopped. He’d never once had reason to look at her ears.
In spring, he also helps his brother Mike on the farm, because Mike’s knees aren’t what they used to be and somebody has to string the wire.
Chad married Kendall two years ago. She’s 35, four years younger than me. She works as a loan processor at the bank in the next town over. She’s pretty and organized and keeps a very clean house.
I’d met her maybe a dozen times. Mostly in the school parking lot. Once at a Christmas program, where she sat next to Chad’s mother and clapped politely.
She was never mean to Emma, as far as I knew. She just never seemed easy around her. Emma said Kendall had a lot of rules.
That didn’t bother me. Rules are fine. Every house has them. I had my own list of rules, and Emma thought mine were just as bad.But there had been little things.
A few months earlier, Emma came home from a weekend and told me Kendall said she “used her ears as an excuse.”
Another time, Kendall told her she didn’t need to wear her hearing aids at the supper table, because “we’re right here, we can just talk louder.”
I mentioned that to Chad on the phone. The call went sideways fast. He thought I was picking at his wife. I thought he wasn’t listening. By the end of it, we were both dragging up things from four years earlier that had nothing to do with hearing aids.
And Emma was in the next room hearing every word. Because, of course, she had her aids in.
After that night, I learned to let the small things go. Chad and I had worked so hard to stop fighting in front of her. I wasn’t going to start again over a supper table rule.
But this was not a supper table rule.
I stood at the front desk with my hand still on the phone and thought about calling Chad.
Anybody would have. It was the obvious thing. And later, more than one person asked me why I didn’t.
Here’s the plain truth. A phone call would have started a fight. And a fight wasn’t going to put sound in Emma’s ears before lunch.
Chad would get defensive. I would get sharp. He’d call Kendall, and Kendall would tell her side, and by the time anybody drove anywhere, it would be the middle of the afternoon.
And the aids were sitting at Chad and Kendall’s house, eleven miles out of town on a gravel road. Both of them were at work. Kendall’s bank was in the opposite direction. Even if Chad agreed with every single word I said, somebody would have to leave work, drive out to the house, find the case and drive back into town.
There was one more reason. It’s the one I’m least proud of.
I didn’t want to beg.
I didn’t want to call my ex-husband and ask, please, could his wife let our daughter hear. I wanted to just fix it. The way I’d fixed most things for Emma on my own for four years.
I also knew where Chad had been all weekend. Emma told me on the phone Friday night that her daddy was “fixing fence with Uncle Mike” and that she was going to help Kendall bake cookies.
In early spring in eastern South Dakota, a man helping on a farm doesn’t come in from the field until it’s too dark to see the fence line.
I would have bet the house that Chad didn’t know. I would have bet it then, and I was right. But I didn’t know I was right yet.
All I knew was that my daughter was sitting in the front row of a third-grade classroom, watching her teacher’s mouth, alone in a quiet she couldn’t get out of.
So I called the audiologist instead.I knew the number by heart.
The receptionist, a woman named Deb who’s been there as long as we’ve been going, picked up on the second ring. I told her who I was. I told her Emma’s aids were unavailable for the week. I asked whether they had a loaner pair.
“Unavailable how?” Deb asked. “Lost? Broken? Is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “They’re just not with her. Somebody else has them, and I can’t get them back today.”
There was a short pause on the line.
Deb has been answering phones at a pediatric clinic for a very long time. I think she heard every single thing I didn’t say.
“We have loaners,” she said. “We keep a few pairs for when kids send theirs in for repair. Her test results are on file. Come now. Doctor can program them to her numbers while you wait.”
“I’m sixty miles out,” I said.
“Then you’d better start driving, honey,” Deb said. I could hear that she was smiling, a little. “We’ll be here.”
I hung up and went down the hall to Dr. Olson’s operatory. He was leaning over a patient with a mirror and a scaler.
I stood in the doorway in my fleece and said, “I need to leave for a few hours. It’s Emma.”
Dr. Olson is 62 and has been fixing teeth in our town since before I was born. He didn’t ask a single question. He just waved the little mirror toward the door.
“Go,” he said. “Kim can run the desk. Drive careful.”
Out in the waiting room, Mr. Peterson looked up from his magazine. “Everything okay with your girl?”
“It will be,” I said.
He gave me a thumbs-up.
I drove out past the grain elevator. Chad’s blue pickup was parked in its usual spot by the scale house. I didn’t slow down.
I took the two-lane west to the interstate and turned south toward Sioux Falls. The fields were bare and brown on both sides. Tractors were out here and there, working the ground with long clouds of dust trailing behind them.
It’s a drive I’ve made more times than I can count. Every audiology appointment. Every earmold fitting. Every time a battery door cracked or a tube split.
Emma and I used to play the license plate game on that road. She liked finding Minnesota plates best, because she said they looked friendly.
That morning, I drove it with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.
Somewhere around Madison, I pulled over at a gas station and called the woman who’d handled my divorce. Linda Haugen. Her office is above the hardware store on Main, and she charges $200 an hour and is worth every penny.
I didn’t want to start a war. I just wanted to know where I stood.Linda listened without interrupting. When I was done, I heard her pull a file drawer open.
