“I can hear you now,” he said. “Real good. These are better than the old ones.”
“I heard,” Cindy said. Her voice was flat.
“I want to tell you something,” Dad said. “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 get him down.
Tell Cindy I’m sorry I missed supper.
The ambulance. Halfway to Springfield. Holding Ray’s hand.
Cindy didn’t move the whole time. She sat on her porch swing with her glass of iced tea in both hands, and the wind chimes going, and her face went from red to white to something I’d never seen on her before.
When Dad got to the part about the ambulance, the glass slipped out of her hands. It fell on the porch boards and broke. Iced tea everywhere.
She didn’t even look at it.
“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 in the porch chair.
“And when Josh started coming around,” he said, “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 at him.
“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 put both hands over her face.
“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 went up the steps. He sat down on the swing next to his mother. He put his arm around her.
She turned and put her face against his shoulder and cried.
Dad sat in the porch chair across from them. He didn’t say anything. He just sat there, with tears running down his face too.
After a long time, Cindy lifted her head.
She looked at Dad. 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 that 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.”
Chapter Eleven: The Claim
Cindy came to our house on Tuesday night.
She’d never been to our house without calling first. She’d never been to our house without Josh inviting her. She stood on our front porch in Bolivar at seven o’clock in the evening, holding a manila envelope.
“Kayla,” she said. “Can I come in?”
I let her in.
She sat at our kitchen table. The same table where Dad told us about the ice storm. Josh came in from the garage and stopped in the doorway when he saw her.
She opened the envelope. She pulled out a stack of papers.
“I called my insurance agent,” she said. “Gary Pfeiffer. At Farm Bureau. Yesterday.” She looked at me. “You knew, didn’t you? About the liability coverage?”
“I knew,” I said. “I didn’t want to make you do it.”
“I know you didn’t.” She pushed the papers across the table. “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,” Cindy said.
She pulled out another paper. A letter from Farm Bureau. Dated that afternoon.
They’d paid it 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 as a prank was horseplay, not an intentional act 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,” I said. “Your premium’s going to go up. For three years, probably. Because of this claim.”
“I know,” she said. “Gary told me. About two hundred a year.” She almost laughed. “I figure that’s cheaper than a cruise.”
Then she pulled out one more thing from the envelope.
A brochure. Carnival Cruise Line. Galveston to Cozumel. Five nights.
“I’m not going,” she said. “Not on that money. That money’s for Leon’s ears. It always was.”
“Mom…”
“But,” she said, and she looked at Josh, “I’d like to go. Someday. For my sixtieth. If you’ll still take me.” She turned the brochure over. “I’ll pay my half. I’ve got a little put back. And I’ll need a cabin mate.”
“Who?” Josh asked.
Cindy looked at the table for a long time.
“I was thinking,” she said slowly, “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 there at my kitchen table and looked at the woman who had told forty people at my rehearsal dinner I was pregnant. Who put a whoopee cushion on Aunt Opal. Who pushed my father off a dock.
Who kept a meatloaf warm in the oven until four in the morning, waiting 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. She told Tammy, who told me. Cindy sat in the chair with foils in her hair and told the whole beauty shop. The reunion. The dock. Leaning into it. The hearing aids. The cruise money. Leon.
She didn’t tell them about the ice storm. That was hers. And Dad’s.
But she told them she was wrong. That Kayla didn’t steal anything. That it was the right thing to do.
“And then she said,” Tammy told me, at the front desk at Dr. Heller’s, “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.”
Chapter Twelve: Next July
The Meeks family reunion was 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. He wore a T-shirt this time. A gray one from the co-op retirees’ fish fry. And swim trunks.
“Figured I’d dress for it this year,” he said.
We went on the cruise in April.
Cindy and Brittany and me. Five nights out of Galveston on the Carnival Breeze. Balcony cabin. Cozumel and Costa Maya. Cindy wore her big floppy hat and both of her new swimsuits. She got sunburned on the second day and peeled for a week.
On the last night, we sat on the balcony with our feet up on the railing, drinking piña coladas out of plastic pineapples, watching the moon come up over the Gulf.
“Ray always said we’d go on a cruise someday,” Cindy said. “When the kids were grown.” She looked out at the water. “I think he’d like this. The three of us.”
Brittany put her head on her mother’s shoulder. I reached over and took Cindy’s hand. She held on.
Opening day, Josh and Dad went to the Cardinals game in St. Louis, like every year.
They had three tickets this time.
Cindy wore a red Cardinals T-shirt she bought at the Walmart in Bolivar. She’d never been to a game. She didn’t know the rules. She cheered for the wrong team twice.
Dad sat between her and Josh and explained every single pitch. She could hear him. He could hear her. They argued about the designated hitter for three innings.
Josh texted me a picture from the seventh-inning stretch. All three of them standing up, singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Cindy had her arm through Dad’s.
Now it was July again. At the pond.
Halfway through the reunion, the kids started jumping off the dock. Josh’s nieces and nephews, the cousins’ kids, a whole crowd of them in swimsuits and life jackets. Cannonballs. Belly flops. Screaming.
“Grandpa Leon!” one of them yelled. Cody’s little boy, Bentley. Six years old. “Grandpa Leon, jump with us!”
He’s not anybody’s grandpa. Not yet. But they all call him that.
Dad looked at the dock. Then he looked at me.
I watched him reach up to his ears. One, then the other. He took out his hearing aids.
Then he walked out onto the dock.
And he stopped in front of Cindy.
She was standing at the end of the dock, where she’d stood last year. Holding a paper plate. Potato salad and a deviled egg and a slice of watermelon.
Dad held out his hand. The two little hearing aids were sitting in his palm.
Cindy looked at them. Then at him.
He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t hear her anyway. He just held them out.
Slowly, she set down her paper plate on the dock. She held out both of her hands, cupped together.
He tipped the hearing aids into them.
Cindy closed her hands around them. Carefully. Like she was holding a baby bird. She held them against 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 whole life asked anybody for help, turned around and ran down that dock in his swim trunks.
And jumped.
Cannonball. The biggest splash of the day. Brown pond water went everywhere. Bentley screamed with joy. All the kids cheered.
Dad came up sputtering, waist-deep in the water beside the dock. Grinning like a kid.
Cindy stood at the end of the dock with her hands pressed against her chest. Holding his hearing aids. She was laughing.
Not the laugh from the dock last year. Not the laugh from her front yard.
A different one. Softer. 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. Like she was showing me.
See? I’ve got them.
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded.
Up the hill, the brisket was ready. Uncle Wade rang the old dinner bell on the porch. The kids scrambled out of the pond and ran for the tables.
Dad climbed up the ladder on the side of the dock. He stood there 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 there together at the end of the dock, a widow and a widower, soaking wet and dry, and listened to a mockingbird show off
