My Boss Took My Badge Before The First Child Arrived

Sterling set my badge on his desk, face down, as if my name had done something dirty.

"Thirty-eight hearing tests," he said. "Twelve thousand, one hundred sixty dollars. You understand how this looks."

Outside his office, a boy tapped the glass fish painted on our waiting room wall. I had promised to show him how the sound booth worked.

"Give me the dates," I said.

"Your access is suspended."

"Those are different subjects."

I was forty-one, an Italian American woman with olive skin, a broad nose, and dark curls I kept pinned above my ears. My name was Francesca Bellini. As a mobile audiologist, I drove a sound booth through eastern Maine and tested people who could not easily reach Bangor.

I always knelt to speak at a child's eye level. Adults liked a white coat. Children liked to see your face before you put strange things in their ears.

Sterling Moss was a broad white man of fifty-three, with pink cheeks, silver hair, and a soft blue cardigan that made him look kind. He owned Lantern Shore Hearing and smiled in every photo from its charity drives.

That morning, he did not smile at me.

"You were out in the field," he said. "Nobody can check every little stop."

"I was on approved leave."

He pushed a paper toward me. It said I had billed for visits on October seventh, ninth, and fourteenth.

On those dates, I had been in Portland with my sister after her hip surgery. My van had been locked in a service bay in Bangor.

"Sign the last page," he said.

It called my signature an acknowledgment of debt. There was a second box saying I had resigned.

I left both blank.

"I'd like a copy."

"Francesca. Think of your license."

I took out my phone and photographed each page lying in front of me.

His hand came down on the stack.

"People out there won't remember one test from another. You should let me handle this quietly."

He meant the people whose kitchens I sat in. People who saved batteries in jam jars. People who knew which grandchild had called by how their hearing aid flashed.

I asked him to put the suspension in writing.

He did. He had already signed it.

In the hall, the boy asked whether I was still coming to his school.

I knelt beside his chair.

"Some grown-ups have to sort out my schedule," I told him. "You didn't do anything wrong."

His mother looked away. Someone had already been talking.

I carried my lunch home in its unopened bag. At my kitchen table, I found the silver van key on my ring. A small brass washer hung beside it.

Amos Redfern had given me that washer after his first hearing-aid fitting.

"Ferry habit," he'd said. "Hang it from string. Gives you a straight line when the whole world looks crooked."

I kept it because I liked its weight.

The key opened my van. Mine, though Sterling called it the clinic van whenever a donor held a camera. I had paid $34,800 for the used vehicle, its booth, and a used audiometer. Lantern Shore paid me rent under a written lease.

In my file drawer were the title, the purchase invoice, and the equipment serial numbers. Sterling had once laughed at the paper copies.

"You planning to take that drawer to court?"

I had laughed too. That was before I learned how quickly a desk could become a border.

I laid the suspension beside that lease. His letter called me an employee responsible for tests. The lease called me an owner responsible for keeping the equipment safe. I could still do that second job.

At four, Amos called.

"You coming Thursday?" he asked.

"I don't know yet."

"That's a different answer from the one your boss gave me."

I sat down again.

Amos was seventy-four, a retired ferry engineer of Penobscot heritage. He coordinated volunteer rides for several river towns. He could line up three cars, seven riders, and a lunch stop without raising his voice.

"What did he tell you?"

"That you made up patients. I told him making up patients was my department. Getting them into a car was the hard part."

I heard paper move near his phone.

"Do you remember a substitute named Evan?"

"Evan Pike. He covered clinic shifts last winter."

"Well, Sterling said he was covering your route this October. Sent me messages about it."

"There was no route. My van was in the shop."

Amos went quiet.

Then he said, "I save ride messages until everybody gets home. Sometimes longer. My daughter calls it clutter. I call it maintenance."

"What kind of messages?"

"Voicemails. Your boss told me to pass them to Evan. Said his own phone kept dropping calls."

The brass washer rested against my wrist.

"Don't erase anything," I said.

"Wasn't planning to. One of them has your billing number in it."