The Tuesday Volunteer Who Did Puzzles With Dad

The lighthouse

Every Christmas of my childhood, we did the same puzzle.

It was a thousand-piece lighthouse, red and white, on a rocky point with gray waves and a pink sky. Mom bought it at the Ben Franklin in Monroe in 1979. It went on the card table in the front room the day after Thanksgiving, and every night after chores, Dad and I worked it.

Steve never cared for puzzles. He was out in the shop from the time he was eleven. But Steve always put in the last piece. Dad would save one back in his shirt pocket, and on New Year’s Eve he’d hand it to Steve, and Steve would roll his eyes and press it in.

When I was nine, one piece went missing. A piece of the lighthouse itself, part of a red stripe. We tore that front room apart. We never found it.

So Mom cut a piece out of the back of a cereal box with her sewing scissors, and colored it with my red crayon, and fit it in. It was a little thicker than the others and the red was a little brighter. For forty years after that, the lighthouse had one homemade piece.

After Mom died, I took the box home from the farm. I don’t know why I’d forgotten it was in my basement. I think I had put it away because I couldn’t look at it.

Megan held it out to me. The corners of the box were soft as cloth. There was still a strip of Scotch tape on the lid from 1985.

“Take it Tuesday,” she said.

“He might not know it.”

“Mom.” She put it in my hands. “Take it anyway.”

The eleventh Tuesday

The eleventh Tuesday was the twenty-fourth of November, two days before Thanksgiving. It was cold and bright, and the maples along the Maple Court driveway had already gone bare. Somebody had put paper turkeys up in the lobby windows.

Beth saw the box under my arm and raised her eyebrows. I told her what it was. She didn’t say anything. She just walked over to the card table by the big window and took away the half-done puzzle of a train depot that was sitting there, and set it gently on the shelf.

Dad was in the other chair already. The brown cardigan. A cup of coffee gone cold beside him.

“Arnold,” I said, and I came at him from the front, and I got down to eye level. “I’m Linda. I carry the mail. I brought one from home today, if that’s all right.”

He looked at the box. He didn’t say anything.

I dumped the pieces onto the table. They smelled like my mother’s front room. I don’t know how that’s possible after all these years in my basement, but they did. Cedar and furnace dust and something else.

We started with the edges, the way he taught me. He didn’t talk. He worked steadily, by shape and not by color, and he was faster than he’d been on any Tuesday so far. Every so often he’d hold a piece up to the window light and turn it, and then put it exactly where it went.

By two thirty we had the frame and most of the waves. I’d held back the cereal box piece in my vest pocket, the way Dad used to hold back the last piece. I was fitting the black iron rail near the top of the lighthouse, my hands right there in the sun.

Dad stopped working.

He set down the piece he was holding. He looked at my hands for a long time. Then he reached across and took my left hand by the wrist and turned it over, palm up, the way he used to when I was a girl and had a splinter from the barn door. He ran his thumb across my knuckles.

“You have my daughter’s hands,” he said.