The Tuesday Volunteer Who Did Puzzles With Dad

The girl at the front desk of Maple Court would not look at me. She looked at her screen, and then at the binder by the phone, and then at the little bowl of butterscotch candies by the sign-in sheet.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Kruse,” she said. “You’re on the list.”

“What list?”

She turned the binder so I could read it. It was one typed page in a plastic sleeve, and my name was the only name on it. Under my name it said, in my brother’s careful block printing: No visits. Resident has been told she passed. Please do not correct.

I read it twice. Then I read the date at the bottom. It had been signed in June. It was the last Saturday in August, and I was holding a bag of the sugar cookies with the pink frosting that my father had liked since before I was born.

“Who told him?” I asked. My voice came out very even, which surprised me.

“His son. His power of attorney.” She finally looked up. She was maybe twenty-two, with a ponytail and a lanyard full of pins. “I’m really sorry. I wasn’t here when it happened. I just have to follow it.”

I set the cookies on the counter. “Would you give him these? You don’t have to say who they’re from.”

She nodded. She did not take them right away, and I understood that she was not sure she was allowed to.

I walked back out to the parking lot. It was hot the way late August gets in southern Wisconsin, the corn tall and dusty along Highway 11. I sat in my car with the door open and did not cry. I called my brother.

Steve picked up on the fourth ring. I could hear the shop behind him, a grinder going, somebody’s radio.

“You told Dad I was dead,” I said.

There was a long pause. The grinder stopped.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because he asked for you every day for eleven weeks, Linda. Every single day. At supper, at bedtime, in the middle of the night. He tried to go out the fire door in his socks to find you. Twice.” His voice was flat and tired. “You weren’t there. I was.”

“So you killed me off.”

“I told him you passed. He cried one night. The next day he was calmer. He quit asking.” I heard him breathe. “He’s had a good summer. He eats. He sleeps. He doesn’t stand at the window anymore.”

“Take me off that list.”

“No.”

“Steve.”

“You don’t get to come back in and make him lose you twice,” he said. “I won’t do that to him. I won’t.” Then he hung up.