I walked straight through those front doors, past the refreshments and the radio remote out front, in my clean shirt.
The fitter saw me and gave me that same tight smile, the one from the day he told me my five thousand dollars was gone.
I did not cuss him out. I had a folder, and one page in it did all the work.
He had told me the warranty was void the moment the hearing aids left his office. Which is a neat trick, seeing as you cannot use a hearing aid inside his office and nowhere else.
But here is what that fitter gambled I would never learn.
This state has a law, I said, that gives a man thirty days to return hearing aids for his money back, and no paper you made me sign can take that away, because a store cannot sign off a right the state hands to me.
Hearing aids are not a used couch. Because so many older folks get taken on them, the state wrote a cooling-off law on purpose, thirty days, money back, no arguments. His fine print did not beat it. Nothing beats it.
I had already called the state, and the licensing board that watches over clinics like his, and it turned out I was not the first hard-of-hearing old man to walk out of there five thousand dollars lighter.
The radio remote was set up twenty feet away, and folks were listening, and I do not mind telling a crowd the truth.
The clinic refunded every dollar rather than answer to the board for breaking a law that plain.
I took my money to an honest audiologist two towns over, one who let me wear the aids a full month before she would keep a cent, and fit them until they were right.
I can hear my grandkids at Sunday dinner now. All of them, all at once, talking over each other. It is the best noise in the whole world.
I did not raise my voice. I did not have to. I finally got to hear everybody else raise theirs.
I told every senior at my church about that thirty-day law. Most of them had no idea it existed. That is exactly how these places like it, a good law that nobody knows, so the fine print can pretend to be the only rule in the room.
Two women from my congregation went and got their own money back the same month, on the same law, from the same kind of tight smile. We are old, but we are not helpless, and there is nothing like a shared piece of knowledge to make a group of grandparents dangerous to a con.
Have a blessed day, I told that fitter. I said it soft. I knew he could hear me.