Sterling Moved Me To Scheduling After I Asked About Missing Hearing Aids

The wooden wren had one foot shorter than the other. Children could rock it with one finger without knocking it down. I had carved it that way on purpose.

Mateo Mendez rocked it while I checked the hearing aids he wore.

"Still the loaners?" I asked.

His mother put her purse down. "You tell me. The bill says we own new ones."

I was Vivian Liang, a thirty-six-year-old Chinese American woman and the pediatric audiologist at Prairie Finch Hearing in Sioux Falls. I was short, with straight black hair cut at my jaw, dark brown eyes, and a pale scar through my left eyebrow.

I knew Mateo's loaners. One had a blue battery door. The other had a scratch shaped like a comma. I had fitted both while we waited for his own pair.

His chart said his new devices had arrived thirty-two days earlier. There was a charge of $10,300, a completed fitting, and a delivery receipt bearing my name.

I had not signed it.

"May I print that statement?" I asked.

"Please," his mother said. "I've been asking what my $824 bought."

Pilar Mendez was thirty-four, Puerto Rican, and a warehouse receiver. She had told me about checking freight while Mateo checked whether my wooden birds could fly. She read every line on a page before turning it over.

I printed her statement and marked the items she questioned. Then I checked his ears, his earmolds, and the loaners. He still needed help hearing his teacher. A billing fight could not wait in front of that need.

"I want his new pair," Pilar said. "I don't want a refund instead of his hearing."

"I understand."

When they left, Mateo put the wren beside my keyboard.

"He can watch," he said.

Across the hall, Sterling Fane was telling a father that children grew at their own pace.

Sterling was a broad, fifty-two-year-old white man with silver hair brushed straight back, soft blue eyes, and smooth pink cheeks.

"No rush," he told the father. "We'll walk beside you."

I waited until his office door closed.

"We billed for Mateo's devices," I said. "He's still wearing our loaners."

Sterling kept his gentle voice. "Delivery and adjustment don't always happen together."

"The receipt says I delivered them."

"Then someone clicked the wrong name."

"It also lists a fitting I didn't do."

His eyes moved toward the door.

"Lower your voice."

"I can correct an error. I need to know where his devices are."

He stood. His chair rolled back against a cabinet.

"You turn knobs, Vivian. Don't decide that makes you our accountant."

The change in his voice was so quick that I looked behind me, as if someone else had entered.

"This is my patient record."

"It's my clinic."

On his desk sat a gold pen and a little stack of delivery forms. One had my typed name beneath a signature that leaned the wrong way.

I asked for copies of the questioned records through our normal correction process. I sent the request from my work account and kept its confirmation number in my desk notebook.

By four, he had his own document ready.

"Scheduling starts tomorrow," he said. "Twenty-seven an hour."

My rate had been $48.

"You're removing me from patient care?"

"Until you learn where your duties end. The temporary audiologist can cover. Parents won't notice which technician sits in the booth."

"I'm an audiologist."

"Then be grateful I'm keeping you employed."

He pushed the notice across the desk. I wrote only that I had received it, followed by the date. I asked for a copy.

That evening, I stood in our test room. Behind its glass, a hearing aid sat in a small sealed box, connected to a standard two-cubic-centimeter coupler. We used that setup to measure sound output before a device went near a child.

My saved acoustic-calibration files included serial numbers, test times, and the bench setup. A bench test alone could not tell me whether a child later received a device. But it could tell me where that device had been at a certain time.

Sterling had called those files useless clutter. Months earlier, he had signed a policy naming me custodian of their separate, locked archive. I still held its recovery token. He had wanted someone else responsible if the system failed.

I left the files where they belonged, on the clinic's secure service. I took no patient records home.

At my new desk the next morning, the wooden wren rocked against the phone cord. An email from Sterling appeared before I answered my first call.

The subject was SALE ANNOUNCEMENT. Its attachment said the buyer would split our children's records between two offices the following Friday.