My Mother in Law Pushed My 68 Year Old Dad Into a Pond as a Joke So I Used Her Cruise Money to Replace His Hearing Aids

The Dock

Halfway through the Meeks family reunion, my mother-in-law pushed my sixty-eight-year-old father off the dock.

She said later it was a joke. She said it about a hundred times.

I was standing three feet away when it happened. I saw her hands go flat against his back. I saw her lean into it. I saw Dad’s arms go out, the way a man’s arms go out when the ground isn’t where he left it.

Then he was in the water.

Dad came up sputtering, waist-deep in the brown water beside the dock.

Uncle Wade’s farm pond is maybe an acre and a half, out past Buffalo, Missouri, in a dip between two hayfields. Cattle drink from it. It’s the color of chocolate milk in July, with a slick of green along the edges and a bottom of soft mud that swallows your feet to the ankle.

His light blue button-up shirt was wet up to the chest. The one he wore to church. He’d worn it because it was a family thing and he wanted to look nice. The water came up past his belt buckle.

He stood there blinking, with pond water running out of his gray hair and down his face.

His hand went to his left ear.

Then his right.

Nothing there.

Forty people at the reunion went quiet at once.

All the Meeks cousins and aunts and uncles and kids, spread out across Uncle Wade’s yard on lawn chairs and blankets and the tailgates of pickups. A few seconds earlier there’d been music playing on somebody’s Bluetooth speaker and kids shrieking on the slip-and-slide and the smell of brisket smoking on the hill.

Now there was nothing. Just the speaker playing Alan Jackson to nobody, and the cicadas, and my father standing in the pond with both hands pressed to his empty ears.

Cindy stood on the dock behind me, holding her paper plate.

Potato salad and a deviled egg and a slice of watermelon. She hadn’t even set it down to do it.

She was smiling.

“Oh, Leon, lighten up,” she said. Loud, so everybody could hear. “It’s July. You needed cooling off. You should’ve taken them out.”

Somebody on the bank laughed. One of the teenage cousins. Then stopped.

Dad looked up at her from the water. He saw her mouth moving. He couldn’t hear a word of it.

I didn’t think. I got down on 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 I felt them scrape 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. He climbed poles for the Southwest Electric Cooperative for thirty-eight years. Through ice storms and tornadoes and summer heat that would cook you inside your rubber gloves. He’s been up a pole in a lightning storm with forty thousand volts three feet from his face, and he’s never once lost his footing.

He doesn’t fall in ponds.

He doesn’t stand in the water with his hands over his ears looking lost.

I pulled. He got one foot on the bottom rung of the old wooden ladder Uncle Wade 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 dock. He stood there dripping. He looked down at me, and then he looked at the water, at the spot where he went in.

“They’re gone, sis,” he said. Too loud. Way too loud. Everybody heard it. “They fell out. They’re gone.”

Chapter Two: Walking the Bottom

Josh was up the hill helping his uncle with the brisket when it happened.

He’d been up there for an hour, him and Uncle Wade and a big black offset smoker Wade built out of an old propane tank. Josh is good with a smoker. He was slicing the first brisket when he heard everybody go quiet, and he looked down the hill and saw my dad standing on the dock, soaking wet.

By the time he ran down, I already had Dad out of the water.

He came across the yard at a dead run, still holding the brisket knife. He stopped at the end of the dock, breathing hard.

“What happened?”

I didn’t answer. I looked at his mother.

Cindy was still standing there with her paper plate. Some of the cousins had come down to the dock. One of the aunts handed Dad 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 his mother. Then at my dad, wrapped in a shark towel, with his hands still going up to his ears every few seconds. Like he couldn’t believe they were really empty.

“His hearing aids,” I said quietly. “They were in.”

Josh closed his eyes.

He knew 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 and bucket trucks and chainsaws and generators will do that. The co-op made them wear earplugs after about 1995. By then it was too late. By the time he retired, he couldn’t hear the phone ring. He couldn’t hear the TV unless it was so loud the neighbors complained.

For three years after he retired, he just quit hearing things. He quit going to church because he couldn’t hear the sermon. He quit going to the café in the morning because he couldn’t hear the other men at the table. He sat in his house in Buffalo by himself.

Then, three and a half years ago, I made him go to an audiologist. I drove him 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 his own footsteps in fifteen years.

Josh and two cousins walked the pond bottom with their bare feet until dark.

Josh, and his cousins Travis and Cody. They stripped down to their swim trunks and waded out to where Dad went in. They walked in a grid, slow, side by side, feeling the bottom with their toes. The mud came up to their shins. The water came up to their chests.

They found a fishing lure. A green plastic worm on a hook, probably lost by Uncle Wade in about 1994.

They found a beer can. A flip-flop. A rock that Cody swore felt exactly like a hearing aid until he pulled it up.

Not the hearing aids.

I knew they wouldn’t find them. I knew it from the first minute.

I work in a dental office. Dr. Heller’s office, on Main Street in Bolivar. I’m the office manager. I handle the insurance, the billing, the scheduling, the patients’ complaints. Part of the job is knowing what equipment costs and what kills it.

I know what water does to anything with a battery. Even if they found them, they’d be done. Pond water, mud, bacteria. The little microphones and the circuits would be ruined in minutes.

Dad had paid four thousand, one hundred dollars for that pair. Three and a half years ago.

I knew that because I helped him write the check. He’d been saving for two years. Out of his co-op pension and his Social Security. Fifty dollars here, a hundred there, in a coffee can in his kitchen. He brought the coffee can with him to the audiologist and counted it out on the counter.

They came with a loss and damage warranty. Three years. If you lost them or broke them, the manufacturer would replace them for a deductible.

The warranty ran out at three.

Six months ago.

And Medicare doesn’t pay a dime for hearing aids.

People don’t believe that when I tell them. They think Medicare covers everything for old people. It doesn’t. Original Medicare doesn’t cover hearing aids. Or the exams to fit them. Dad has a supplement plan through the co-op retirees’ group, and it doesn’t cover them either.

You can buy over-the-counter ones now, at Walmart or the pharmacy. A few hundred dollars. But those are for mild hearing loss. Dad’s is severe. The audiologist told us that the first day. He needed real ones. Prescription ones, fitted to his ears.

Four thousand dollars, or he goes back to not hearing anything.

On the bank, as it was getting dark, Dad sat in a lawn chair wrapped in the shark towel. He was watching the boys walk the pond. He hadn’t said much in two hours. When people talked to him, he just nodded.

I sat down in the grass next to his chair. He leaned over toward me.

“Don’t make trouble with her on my account, sis,” he said.

Too loud. Way too loud. Half the reunion heard him.

Cindy, sitting at the picnic table with her sisters, heard him too. She looked over at us. Then she looked away and laughed at something her sister said.

I didn’t say one word to Cindy that day.

Not one. Not when she came over to say goodbye 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 anybody 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 the window at the hayfields going by in the dark.

He didn’t say anything the whole way. He couldn’t hear the radio, so I turned it off.

Chapter Three: Who Cindy Is

I need to tell you about my mother-in-law. So you understand.

Cindy Meeks is fifty-nine. She runs the cash register at the Dollar General in Buffalo four days a week and gets her hair done every Thursday at the 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.

She’s always been that way. Josh says she’s always been that way.

At our wedding 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 Josh’s ninety-year-old great-aunt’s chair. Aunt Opal sat on it. Everybody laughed. Aunt Opal went red to her hairline and left before pie.

At Josh’s cousin’s baby shower, 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 cruel, exactly. Josh always says that. “She’s not mean, Kayla. She just doesn’t know when to stop.”

I’m not sure there’s a difference.

Josh’s dad died when Josh was eleven.

His name was Ray Meeks. He was a lineman too. 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 with an old man on oxygen inside. A tree limb came down on the line he was working on.

Josh doesn’t talk about it much. Neither does Cindy.

I know Josh grew up without a father from eleven on. Cindy raised him 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 Josh to fish. He took him to Cardinals games in St. Louis. When Josh’s truck broke down, Dad was the one who got under it with him. When Josh asked me to marry him, he asked my dad first, sitting on Dad’s front porch, and Dad told me later he cried after Josh left.

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 anybody. Not even my dad.

Josh and I had been putting back two hundred and fifty dollars a month for eighteen months. Into a separate savings account at Mid-Missouri Bank, with a little tag on it in the online banking app. MOM’S CRUISE.

Four thousand, five hundred dollars.

A cruise for Cindy’s sixtieth birthday next spring. Out of Galveston. Five nights. Cozumel and Costa Maya. A balcony cabin. She’d never been on a cruise. She’d never been anywhere, really. Branson, once. Eureka Springs.

It was Josh’s idea. He felt like his mom had given up everything for him and his sister. He wanted to give her something big.

We were going to surprise her at Christmas. Wrap up a little plastic boat in a box.

But she found out. Josh’s sister Brittany let it slip at Easter. And Cindy had been telling the whole Shear Elegance about it ever since. Every Thursday. Her son was taking her on a cruise. A balcony cabin. She’d already bought two new swimsuits at the JCPenney in Springfield and a big floppy hat.

She’d been telling everybody at the reunion about it too. Right before she pushed my dad off the dock.

Chapter Four: The Back Steps

Sunday evening, I sat with Josh on our back steps.

We live in a little brick ranch house in Bolivar, about thirty minutes from Buffalo. Three bedrooms, a chain-link fence, a maple tree in the backyard with a tire swing Josh hung for the nieces and nephews.

It was hot and still. The fireflies were coming up out of the grass. Josh had two beers. He handed me one. I didn’t drink it.

I’d spent most of Sunday on the phone. And on 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’s gone. 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 didn’t say anything. He looked out at the tire swing.

“I looked into one other thing,” I said. “Your mom’s homeowner’s insurance.”

Josh turned and looked at me.

“Most homeowner’s policies have personal liability coverage,” I said carefully. “If you damage somebody else’s property by accident, it pays. Like if you hit a baseball through the neighbor’s window. Or if you push somebody into a pond and ruin their hearing aids.”

“Kayla…”

“I’m not saying we should,” I said. “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 there with that for a while. 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 said. “I know she’s been telling everybody. I know it’ll be a mess. But Josh, he can’t hear. He’s sitting in his house in Buffalo right now, alone, and he can’t hear the TV or the phone or anything. And he’s not going to ask anybody for help. He never has.”

Josh looked at the yard a long time.

He looked at the tire swing. At the maple tree. At the fireflies coming up 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.

“It was ours to give,” he said finally. “Do it.”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

Then he said something else.

“And I’ll tell Mom myself.”

“Josh, you don’t have to…”

“Yes, I do,” he said. He set his beer down 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 got tight. “And then she told him to lighten up.”

He stood up.

“I’m not going to let you be the one who tells her,” he said. “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.”

Chapter Five: Springfield

Monday morning I took a personal day and drove Dad to the audiologist in Springfield.

I 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.

Then I drove to Buffalo and picked up Dad. He was waiting on his front porch in a clean shirt. A plaid one, not the blue. I think the blue one was still drying on the line out back.

He didn’t know where we were going. I’d just texted him: Picking you up at 8. Wear shoes.

He got in the car and looked at me.

“Where to, sis?” Too loud.

I held up the legal pad I’d brought. I’d written it on the first page in big black letters.

SPRINGFIELD. HEARING AIDS.

He read it. He looked at me.

“Kayla,” he said. “No.”

I flipped the page. I’d already written the next one.

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 the page.

AUDIOLOGIST SAID NO. TOO WEAK FOR YOU.

He looked out the windshield. His jaw worked.

“I’ll save up,” he said. “Like last time.”

I flipped the page. I didn’t have anything written on it. I 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 didn’t say anything else.

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. She remembered Dad.

“Mr. Pruitt,” she said, loud and slow, facing him so he could see her lips. “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

Dad nodded. He looked embarrassed.

“Come on back,” she said.

She tested him again. Forty-five minutes in a little soundproof booth, with headphones on, pressing a button every time he heard a beep.

His hearing had gotten worse. Not a lot. But some. Dr. Patel showed me the chart afterward. A line that dipped down and down, like a ski slope.

“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.”

“So the same model?”

“The newer version,” she said. “Better feedback control. Bluetooth, so he can stream phone calls straight into his ears.” She paused. “And a rechargeable battery. No more little batteries to fiddle with. His hands were having a hard time with those last time.”

“How much?”

She looked at her computer.

“Four thousand, three hundred,” she said. “That includes the fitting, the follow-ups for three years, and a three-year loss and damage warranty.” She hesitated. “I’ll be honest, Mrs. Meeks. I’d recommend getting him a waterproof case and a clip. After this.”

I wrote the check at the front desk. Out of the account with the little tag that said MOM’S CRUISE.

Four thousand, three hundred dollars. That left two hundred in the account.

The receptionist gave me a receipt. I folded it and put it in my purse.

Dad was standing next to me at the counter. He watched me write the check. He didn’t say anything. His face was very red.

Out at the car, Dad was still shaking his head.

He stood by the passenger door in the hot parking lot with his hands in his pockets. He wouldn’t get in.

“That’s your money, Kayla,” he said. Too loud. A woman walking into the building turned around and looked at us. “That’s your and Josh’s money. I saw the account. I saw what it said on there.”

I didn’t know he’d seen it. I’d tried to hide the checkbook register.

“That’s Cindy’s cruise,” he said. “I can’t take Cindy’s cruise. Not after… not after all this. She’ll never forgive you. She’ll never forgive Josh.”

I opened my legal pad on the hood of the car. It was so hot I could feel it through the cardboard backing. I wrote slowly, in big letters, so he could read every word.

Then I held it up.

IT’S FAMILY MONEY. YOU’RE FAMILY.

He read it. His face did something. His chin started to shake.

I flipped to a new page and wrote one more line. I held it up.

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.

Chapter Six: The Mockingbird

They fitted them Thursday.

I took another half day. Dr. Heller just raised an eyebrow and said, “Go.”

The fitting took an hour. Dr. Patel put them in his ears and plugged them into her computer with a little cable and adjusted the settings. She’d say words to him. Baseball. Sidewalk. Hot dog. And he’d repeat them back. Every few minutes she’d turn something up or down on her screen.

At the end, she sat back in her chair.

“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?” she asked.

Dad didn’t answer right away. He just sat there in the chair with his mouth a little bit open.

“I can hear you,” he said. And he said it at a normal volume. For the first time since the reunion.

Dr. Patel gave him a little black case, the charging case, and showed him how to use it. And a waterproof clip with a lanyard, so he could pin them to his collar when he took them out. And a little card with her phone number on it, 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.

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.

There’s a row of pear trees along the edge of the lot at Ozarks Hearing Center. Bradford pears, the kind the city plants everywhere. It was hot and still, and the air smelled like asphalt and cut grass.

Dad stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. He tilted his head.

“What kind of bird is that?” he asked.

I listened. I hadn’t even noticed it.

A mockingbird. Up in one of the pear trees. Running through every song it knew. A cardinal. Then a blue jay. Then a robin. Then something that sounded like a car alarm, which mockingbirds in town 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 there under the pear tree with his head tilted up and his hands at his sides.

He stood there listening like it was the first bird God ever made.

I had to look at the pavement for a minute.

The thing is, I knew he’d heard birds before. He’d had hearing aids for three and a half years. He’d heard mockingbirds.

But I think, for five days, he thought he’d never hear one again. I think he’d sat alone in his house in Buffalo for five days, 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 parking lot in Springfield, 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 was 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. She was sixty-one.

I’d never heard that story before.

“She’d have liked this one,” Dad said. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “This one’s a real show-off.”

On the drive home, he talked the whole way. Forty-five minutes. He talked about the co-op. About Mom. About the ice storm in 2007, 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 in the middle of sentences. To listen to the turn signal clicking. To the tires on the road. To my radio, which I’d turned on low, playing 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 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.