The Tuesday Volunteer Who Did Puzzles With Dad

He was bad at it. He was terrible. He tried the same piece in four different spots. Dad finally reached over and took it out of his hand and put it in where it went and said, “Shape, son. Not color.”

Steve laughed. It came out of him like something cracking. He put his hand over his eyes for a minute, and Dad patted his shoulder without looking up from the puzzle.

At about three, there was one hole left. The red stripe on the lighthouse. Dad studied it, and then patted the pile, and then patted his shirt pocket out of habit, like the piece might be there.

I reached into my vest. I took out my mother’s cereal box piece, with the red crayon on it, a little too thick and a little too bright, and I didn’t hand it to Dad. I set it on the table in front of Steve.

He looked at it. He knew it. Of course he knew it.

He picked it up and pressed it into the hole with his thumb, the way he had every New Year’s Eve since he was seven years old.

“There,” Dad said. “There you go.” And he sat back in his chair and looked at the lighthouse in the sun and smiled at it like he’d built it himself.

The hallway

Afterward, Beth took Dad to exercise group, and Steve and I stood in the back hall by the laundry, where I’d been sneaking out for three months.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lin. I don’t even know how to say it to you.”

“I’m sorry too,” I said. “For the kitchen table. For what I said about the farm. For not coming. For all those months of it.”

“You were right about one thing,” Steve said. “I didn’t want to drive out there anymore.” He looked at the floor. “I was so tired. I was so tired, and you were so mad at me, and he kept asking for you, and I just wanted one thing in this whole mess to stop hurting.”

“I know.”

“It didn’t stop hurting him. It just stopped hurting me.” He turned his cap around in his hands. “Beth told me what he said. About your hands.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

He went straight to Jeff’s office that afternoon, in his work jacket, and took me off the list himself. He told Jeff and Beth both, out loud, that he’d made a bad call in June and it was his to fix. Then he told the shift nurse the same thing, for Dad’s chart.

I know that was not easy. Steve is a proud man, the same as I am a proud woman. We got it from the same place. It cost him something to say it in front of people who had watched him come in every night for nine months, and he said it anyway.

We decided together, with Beth and the nurse, that nobody would sit Dad down and tell him I was alive. Beth said it would be one more shock for nothing. If he asked, we’d go where he was. If he didn’t, I’d keep coming as Linda who carries the mail. Steve agreed. I agreed.

Then Steve asked Beth for a volunteer application. She gave him one. He filled it out right there in the hallway, leaning on the laundry cart.