The Tuesday Volunteer Who Did Puzzles With Dad

Beth

I filled out the application the next Monday, on my lunch, sitting in the Jeep at the end of a field driveway on Barlow Road. It asked for my name, my address, two references, and my availability.

I put my real name. I want that understood. I did not lie on the form and I did not plan to lie to the staff. Linda Kruse, rural carrier, Tuesdays.

My relief carrier, Kim, had been wanting more days. I asked her if she’d take Tuesdays for a while, and she said she’d take Tuesdays forever if I let her.

Beth called me two days later. Her office was a converted storage room behind the activity room, with a shelf of jigsaw puzzles going to the ceiling. She was a little older than me, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a pumpkin pin on her cardigan.

She shut the door. She sat down. She put my application on the desk between us.

“I know who you are,” she said.

“I figured you might.”

“Arnold had your picture on his dresser when he came in. Your brother took it down in June.” She took her glasses off. “So you tell me what you’re doing, and you tell me straight.”

So I told her. All of it, including the kitchen table and what I’d said about the farm. I told her I didn’t want to be his daughter again if it would hurt him. I told her I just wanted to be in a room with him on a Tuesday.

Beth didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “Your dad does puzzles.”

“He always did.”

“He does them alone, at the card table by the big window. Every afternoon. He sets out two chairs. Every afternoon, two chairs.” She looked at me. “Nobody sits in the other one. He won’t let anybody. He says it’s saved.”

I had to look at the bird feeders for a minute.

“Here’s what I can do, and here’s what I can’t,” Beth said. “I can’t put you on the visitor list. That’s your brother’s call as long as he’s the POA and the care team agrees with it. I can put you in my volunteer program if Jeff signs off. Jeff’s our administrator.”

“Will he?”

“He might. If you agree to some things.”

She counted them on her fingers. A Wisconsin caregiver background check. A TB test. The four-hour dementia care orientation she taught herself in the dining room on the second Saturday of the month. The badge and the blue vest. And Beth or one of her aides in the room any time I was with him.

“And the big one,” she said. “You never tell him who you are. Not one word. If he gets upset, if he gets confused about you, you get up and you leave and you don’t argue with me.”

“And Steve?”

“I won’t go running to him. But I won’t lie to him either. If he asks me who the Tuesday volunteer is, I’ll tell him.” She put her glasses back on. “He hasn’t asked anybody anything all summer. He comes at five, he eats supper with your dad, he goes home.”

I took the training on the second Saturday in September. There were six of us, including a retired dentist.

Beth taught us the things you learn. Come in from the front so you don’t startle them. Get down to eye level. Say your name every time. Don’t argue with the world they’re in, step into it with them. Don’t quiz them. Never, ever say, “Don’t you remember?”

The retired dentist asked what we should do if a resident asked about a family member who had died. Beth said, “You don’t make them hear it fresh. You go where they are.” She didn’t look at me when she said it, but I felt it anyway.

The badge came in the mail at the post office, of all places, in an envelope with the Maple Court logo. I sorted it into my own box. It was white plastic with a pin on the back and blue letters.

It said Linda. Nothing else.