“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 off in Buffalo at four o’clock. He stood on his front porch and waved as I backed out of the driveway.
Then, as I was pulling away, he called out something. I rolled down the window.
“What, Dad?”
“I said thank you,” he said. At a normal volume. From his porch. Twenty feet away. “I heard myself say it.”
Chapter Seven: Cindy’s Porch
Saturday, Josh drove out to his mother’s place.
I rode along. He didn’t want me to at first. He said he’d handle it. But I told him I wasn’t going to let him walk into that alone either.
Cindy lives in the house Josh grew up in. A little white two-bedroom on the edge of Buffalo, on Hickory Street, with a carport and 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. The wind chimes were going crazy.
Cindy came down her porch steps to meet us in the front yard.
She was wearing capris and a T-shirt that said LIFE IS BETTER AT THE LAKE. Her hair was done. It was Saturday, so she’d been to Shear Elegance on Thursday. She had a big smile on her face.
“There’s my boy,” she said.
She held out her arms.
Josh didn’t hug her.
She stopped. Her arms came down slowly. She looked at him. Then at me, standing behind him by the truck.
“Well,” she said. “What’s wrong with you two? You look like somebody died.”
Josh took a breath. I could see his hands shaking a little at his sides.
“Mom,” he said. “There’s no cruise.”
She laughed.
The same laugh. The one from the dock. Light and high and a little bit too loud.
“Very funny,” she said.
“It’s not a joke, Mom,” Josh said. “Kayla spent it Monday. On Leon’s ears.”
Cindy looked at me.
Then at her son.
Then she opened her mouth.
And what came out was not what I expected.
“On Leon’s ears,” she repeated.
Quietly. Flatly. Like she was saying it 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 were going behind her, a hundred little bells all 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,” he said. “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 was red. “Everybody knows you take your hearing aids out around water! That’s on him! Not me!”
The neighbor across the street, an old man in a lawn chair, stood up and went inside.
“You told everybody,” Josh said. His voice was very quiet. “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,” Josh said. “Isn’t it? Not Leon. Not his ears. You’re embarrassed.”
She didn’t answer. She turned around. She marched back up her porch steps and stopped at the door.
Then she turned back.
“He’s always been the one,” she said. Her voice was 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,” she said. “And he gets my birthday.”
She went inside and slammed the door. The wind chimes all rang at once.
Josh stood in the front yard for a long time.
I came up beside him and took his hand. It was cold, even in July.
“She’s never said that before,” he said quietly. “About Leon. Not once.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t know she felt like that.”
“I know.”
He looked up at the house. At the forty wind chimes. At the porch swing his father hung in 1998, still hanging.
“Let’s go home,” he said.
Chapter Eight: The Beauty Shop
By Thursday, the whole town knew.
That’s how it works in Buffalo, Missouri. Population three thousand. Cindy went to Shear Elegance on Thursday afternoon like always. And she told everybody.
Except it wasn’t the story that happened.
My coworker Tammy told me. Her sister-in-law gets her hair done at Shear Elegance on Thursdays too.
“She says you stole her cruise,” Tammy said, at the front desk at Dr. Heller’s. She said it quietly, so the patients in the waiting room wouldn’t hear. “She says you convinced 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.”
I set down the phone I was holding.
“She says it was just a little joke at the reunion,” Tammy went on. “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 didn’t say anything.
I want to be honest about that. I wanted to. I wanted to call every woman at Shear Elegance and tell them exactly what happened. I wanted to tell them about the shark towel and the empty ears and the boys walking the pond until dark.
But I thought about Dad, on the bank, leaning over to me. Too loud.
Don’t make trouble with her on my account, sis.
So I didn’t.
Josh heard it at the feed store. His cousin Cody told him at the gas station. Somebody posted something on 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. He put his phone face down and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Should I say something?” he asked. “Post something? Tell people what really happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Would it help?”
“No,” he said. “It’d just make two sides. And then everybody’d have to pick one.”
Dad heard it at the café.
That was the thing I didn’t think about. Dad went back to the Buffalo Café the Tuesday after he got his new hearing aids. For the first time in a week. He sat at the long table in the back with the retired men, the way he used to every morning before his hearing got bad.
And he heard everything. Every word. Clear as a bell. Better than he had in fifteen years.
Including what Walt Hensley’s wife said at the booth behind him to Lois Kemper.
“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 didn’t say anything to them. He finished his coffee. He paid his bill. He left a dollar for the waitress.
Then he went home and called me. On his phone. Which he could hear now, through the Bluetooth, straight into his ears.
“Sis,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“Does Cindy know about Ray?”
I didn’t understand.
“Josh’s dad,” Dad said. “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 for a long time.
“That’s not what I asked,” he said.
Chapter Nine: The Ice Storm
He told me that night. He drove over to Bolivar after supper and sat at our kitchen table and told both of us. Josh and me.
He’d never told anybody. Not in eighteen years. Not even my mother.
January 13th, 2007. The ice storm.
Dad was a crew foreman by then. He’d been with the co-op twenty years. Ray Meeks was on his crew. Ray was thirty-four. He’d been a lineman for nine years. Dad 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 for thirty-one hours straight. Half of Dallas County had no power. The ice was two inches thick on every line. Trees were coming down everywhere 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 had failed. His daughter was 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 stopped. He looked down at the kitchen table.
“I didn’t see the limb,” he said. “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 was sitting very still across the table.
“The limb came down on the line,” Dad said. “Right where Ray was working. It took the line and the crossarm and Ray with it.”
Nobody in my kitchen breathed.
“I climbed up,” Dad said. “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,” he said quietly. “And your sister. And your mom. He said, tell Cindy I’m sorry I missed supper.”
Josh made a sound I’d never heard him make.
“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,” he said. “They said it was an accident. Nobody’s fault. The storm. The ice.” He shook his head. “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 I stood in the back and I never once told her I was the one who sent him up there.”
“Is that why?” Josh asked. His voice was thick. “Is that why you… when I was sixteen? The fishing? The Cardinals games?”
Dad nodded slowly.
“I owed him,” he said. “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,” he said. “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,” he said. “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 up.
“I’m going to go see her,” he said. “Tomorrow. And I’m going to tell her.”
Chapter Ten: What Leon Told Her
He went on a Sunday afternoon. After church.
He asked us to come with him. Not to talk. Just to be there. “In case she throws something,” he said. He almost smiled.
We drove out to Hickory Street in two cars. Dad in his old Silverado. Josh and me in ours. When we pulled up, Cindy was sitting on her porch swing with a glass of iced tea. The wind chimes were going.
She saw Dad’s truck and stood up.
She saw Josh’s truck behind it and sat back down.
Dad walked up her front walk. Slowly. He’d put on his blue button-up shirt. 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,” he said.
“Leon.”
“Can I sit?”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded at the porch chair across from the swing.
He came up the steps and sat down. Josh and I stayed at the bottom of the steps, by the carport. She didn’t tell us to leave.
Dad reached up and touched his right ear. The new hearing aid. Then his left.
