The Tuesday Volunteer Who Did Puzzles With Dad

The first Tuesday

The first Tuesday was the fifteenth of September. I put on the blue vest in the car. My hands were shaking so badly I stuck myself with the pin twice.

Dad was at the card table by the big window, just like Beth said. The sun was coming in across the tile. He had on a brown cardigan I’d never seen, and his hair was cut shorter than he’d ever worn it, and he was thinner. He was working on a puzzle of a covered bridge in the fall.

There were two chairs. One was pushed in tight.

Beth walked me over. She got down beside him the way she’d taught us. “Arnold, this is Linda. She’s one of our new volunteers. She likes puzzles.”

He looked up at me. He had the same pale blue eyes he always had, and there was nothing in them about me. Just politeness. A farmer’s politeness for somebody he’d met at the feed mill.

“Arnold Kruse,” he said. He half stood up, like he always did for women, and put out his hand. “I farmed dairy. Sixty head. Down on 11.”

I shook my father’s hand like I was meeting him.

“Linda,” I said. “I carry mail.”

“Rural route?”

“A hundred and twelve miles.”

“Gravel?”

“Most of it.”

He nodded like that settled something. Then he looked at the pushed-in chair, and he looked at me, and he pulled the chair out.

I sat down. I don’t remember the next twenty minutes very clearly. I remember he was working the sky, which was the hard part, all those same blue pieces, and he did it the way he always had, by shape and not by color. I remember I found one edge piece and he said, “There you go.”

That was all. There you go. I drove home and parked in my driveway and sat in the Jeep until the dome light went off by itself.