"…As a young student at Gallaudet, the college for the deaf in Washington, D.C., she had won every lip-reading contest she ever entered.
Mother and Daddy were so good at knowing what we were saying, even when we mumbled or muttered, that I often wondered if they had been playing some sort of strange, elaborate trick on us all these years. Maybe they were just pretending to be deaf, I sometimes thought. Supposedly, Mother had lost her hearing as a baby after a terrific case of scarlet fever, and Daddy told us he had been struck deaf by lightning when he was eight as he stood on his front porch watching a fierce thunderstorm churning up the sky. But just maybe all those stories were lies. Maybe they were just waiting to catch us in the act, to catch us when we screamed up and down the stairs at each other before school every morning or played the radio too loud or gossiped about the ladies who rented the spare bedrooms in our big creaky house on Myrtle Street.
Mother gave us another frown, then turned away. 'See?' said Margaret. 'You're going to get us both in trouble.'
I studied Mother's face for a minute, checking to see if anything was amiss. But I could tell she had already forgotten about any problems Margaret and I might be having. As usual, she and Daddy had all the worries of their congregation to attend to.…" --excerpted from the book
