The Patient Asked About A Purchase That Never Came Home

Mrs. Cho put her bill beside my box of wax guards.

"Can you tell me what I bought for $4,860?"

I had just asked her which familiar sound she missed most. I asked every patient that before a fitting. Some said birds. Some said the turn signal in their car.

"My rice cooker," she had said. "My husband always heard it first."

Now she held out her open palm. Two gray hearing aids rested on it. Each battery door had a small blue dot.

Blue meant loaner.

I was a short Puerto Rican woman with brown skin, silver curls pinned above my ears, and a thin white scar across my left thumb. At sixty-nine, I had fitted hearing aids long enough to know that a person could miss a small kitchen sound more than a whole choir.

I worked as a hearing-instrument specialist at Bellamy Hearing Room in Dover, Delaware. I took ear impressions, checked fit, changed receivers, and taught people how to hear without making every dish sound like a crash.

I also kept the loaner cards.

They were yellow, with spaces for serial numbers, dates, and two signatures. I wrote the sound each patient wanted back on the last line. The cards stayed in a locked cabinet behind the fitting rooms.

Lucian Bellamy called them my little history project.

"These are still our trial pair," I told Mrs. Cho. "Your own set hasn't arrived. Let me check the charge."

"I called twice. They said I signed."

"You signed for a loan."

Lucian stepped in before I opened her account.

He owned the clinic. He was forty-three, white, and born in Ohio, which he mentioned whenever he said Americans needed to work faster.

Lucian was a tall white man with pale blue eyes, sandy hair cut close at the sides, and shoes that never seemed to meet a puddle.

"A coding problem," he said. "I'll handle it. Carmen, take your break."

"Her card is in the current drawer."

"I said I'll handle it."

Mrs. Cho closed her fingers around the aids.

"I'd like Carmen to stay."

Lucian smiled at her. His voice changed, warm and slow.

"Of course. We want you comfortable."

He printed a blank adjustment request, wrote her name, and promised a call by Friday. He did not remove the charge.

After she left, he shut my fitting-room door.

"That cannot happen in front of a patient again."

"Which part? Reading her bill?"

"Contradicting the owner."

Rain moved down the window. Across the parking lot, a delivery driver dragged a box under his jacket. Our small office sat near Route 13, where people hurried past on their way through Dover without seeing much of it.

Lucian set a personnel form on my desk.

"You're moving to intake Monday. No programming. No fittings. You'll answer phones and prepare rooms."

I read the pay line twice. Thirty-four dollars an hour had become twenty-one.

"You cut thirteen dollars an hour."

"The role pays less."

"Why am I losing my role?"

He pointed at my open adjustment notebook.

"Look at this. Arrows. Crossed-out numbers. At your age, Carmen, fitting is too much to keep straight."

The arrows showed that I had lowered high-frequency gain after Mrs. Cho said running water hurt. The crossed-out number showed a receiver change. Both changes were dated.

"Those are fitting notes."

"They're confusion on paper."

He slid a pen toward me.

I wrote, Received Only. I added the time and asked for a copy.

He looked annoyed by the words.

"Don't turn this into a thing. We have a buyer coming."

That was the first I heard about a sale.

At lunch, I sat in my car with the personnel form across my knees. My daughter called from Newark to ask about Sunday dinner.

"Bring the beans," I said.

I didn't tell her yet. I needed to know what had happened before I made her carry it with me.

Back inside, I finished Mrs. Cho's chart while my access still worked. Her account showed a permanent purchase entered eleven days earlier. The serial numbers matched our loaners.

My notebook could be called untidy. Her signed loaner card could not be called a sale.

As the staff member assigned to maintain that archive, I had kept every return card for six years. Lucian had never asked how the cards were filed.

I opened the cabinet and checked Mrs. Cho's original. Temporary Use Only sat above her signature, in print large enough for tired eyes.

Then I found the blue mark in the purchase system beside another patient's name.

The same pair had been sold on paper before.

At five, Lucian left an envelope on my chair. Inside was a disposal list for old records. Across the top, in his clean black type, he had written: Yellow Loaner Cards Included.