“Live,” Dad said slowly, hearing the word through his own aids and looking at me as though it came from the far end of a tunnel. “He told Frank that I did not have long to live. Frank was crying on that call, Mikey. The daughter of Gina stood in my kitchen with my telephone, and I had no ears to hear him and no voice they would let me use.” He pressed his knuckles to his mouth. “All that time, and my oldest friend believed I was dying.” I sat on the arm of his recliner and held his shoulders until the trembling passed.
Mr. Gutierrez made a call to the settlement administrator in San Diego, a careful woman named Mrs. Okamura, and what she told us took the color out of the room. In August, a man had telephoned her office claiming to be Walter Sullivan. He sounded old, she said, but a little too young under the old. He asked that the ninety six thousand dollar check be sent to a care account at a bank in Bakersfield. She had asked him the hull number of his ship. He had hesitated. She had put the check on hold the same hour.
The account in Bakersfield belonged to Brittany. Detective Barnes of the Bakersfield police pulled the records, and the records pulled the rest of the thread. The telephone used to make the calls belonged to a young man named Cody Rankin, the boyfriend of Brittany, who drove a tow truck and owed money to three different people. In the messages between the two of them, found on a laptop in the bedroom of Brittany, one line stood out. It said, “Old man is sick enough. Just say he is dying, and they will rush the check.” Detective Barnes read it twice.
A man can lose his ears for a while, but a friend of seventy years always hears him.
They arrested Cody at a tire shop in Delano with his coveralls still on. Brittany and Gina were found at the house of a sister in Fresno, sitting at a card table, eating a pizza. Gina asked for a lawyer before the officer finished reading her rights. Later, through that lawyer, she explained that she had accumulated forty eight thousand dollars in credit card debt I never knew about, and that she had only meant to borrow from my father until things improved. The detective said borrowing is something you ask for.
At the hearing, my father wore his old Navy dress jacket, which had grown loose around his chest. He had his hearing aids in, set to the highest clarity, and he sat in the front row listening to every syllable. When the judge asked if he wished to speak, he stood, put his cap under his arm, and addressed her without a note. “Your Honor,” he said, “I have heard the sound of a ship sinking. It was not as terrible as the sound of my own family closing a door on me.” The room did not breathe.
Gina pleaded guilty to elder abuse and fraud and received four years. Brittany got three and Cody five. I filed for divorce on a Tuesday and signed on a Friday, and I felt neither angry nor relieved, only hollow, like a pipe that has had the water drained from it. The closet under the stairs I emptied myself, down to the paint on the wall. I carried the folding chair out to the curb, and I watched a garbage truck eat it in one bite.
The audiologist, a patient woman named Dr. Nguyen, fitted Dad with a new pair of aids the size of grains of rice, with a little Bluetooth chip so he could hear the television without turning it up. On the way out of her office, he stopped in the parking lot, lifted his head, and stood completely still. A mockingbird was singing in a pepper tree. He had not heard a bird in four months. He wept without a sound, and I stood beside him with my hand on his back until the song was finished.
In May, I flew him to San Diego. Frank Oyler met us at the gate in a wheelchair, eighty nine years old and as tough as a boot, and the two of them stared at each other for a full ten seconds. Then they both began to talk at once. We spent the afternoon on the flight deck of the old Midway, now a museum, where my father stood at the rail in the wind and saluted the empty sky. The administrator, Mrs. Okamura, put the settlement check into his palm herself, in the shade of the island.
Dad put ten thousand dollars into a college fund for the grandson of Frank. He used another thousand to buy a round of root beer floats for every sailor in the museum café, and he made a speech about it. I had taken a position supervising a data center out by the airport in Bakersfield, close to home, with no more flights. On Saturdays, the two of us go to a ballgame, and he eats three hot dogs, and he hears the crack of every bat.
The spot under the stairs has a door again, but I took off the knob. Now it is a reading nook with a lamp, a cushion, and a stack of Navy histories. Dad sits in it sometimes, just to prove he can leave. This morning, I called him for breakfast three times from the kitchen. He appeared in the doorway with a mischievous grin. “Sorry, Mikey,” he said, tapping his ear. “I did not hear you.” Then he winked, and he sat down, and he ate every bite of his eggs.
