At my hospice patient’s ninetieth birthday, her grandson pushed a wrinkled garage ticket into my hand and said, “Go get this stamped, that’s what Grandma pays you people for.” It was fourteen dollars. Nobody pays me. And he had no idea whose name was on that room, or what she’d told me to carry in my purse.
Rosaleen had been my Tuesday for almost two years.
That’s how the hospice says it. You get matched with somebody, and they become your day of the week.
Mine turned ninety on a Saturday.
The room was the Knights of Columbus hall in Logansport. Sixty-four chairs, a DJ who was somebody’s cousin, and a lemon cake with blackberries on top because Rosaleen said chocolate was for people with no imagination.
I wore my volunteer lanyard because she asked me to.
“So they know you’re with me,” she said.
That lanyard was the first thing Dane looked at.
He came in at 2:20 with his wife, Bailey, carrying nothing.
He walked right past his grandmother’s wheelchair and came over to me at the gift table.
“You’re with the place, right?”
I said no. I was with Rosaleen.
He held the ticket up anyway. The garage across the street, the one with the gate arm.
“Same thing. Get it stamped. That’s what Grandma pays you people for.”
Nobody pays me.
Hospice volunteers volunteer. That’s the whole job title.
I told him that, nicely.
He laughed and turned to Bailey like I’d done a trick for him.
“So you do this for FREE? Sit with old ladies all day for nothing?” he said. “Okay. Then what’s the angle.”
Bailey smiled down into her phone.
I held the ticket back out to him. He didn’t take it, so I set it on the gift table, next to the card from her church group.
It stayed there the whole afternoon.
A man by the coffee urn had a watch on each wrist. I don’t know why I still remember that.
Vicki found me around three. Rosaleen’s daughter. Dane’s mother.
She looked at the lanyard the same way her son had.
“We’ve got family up front,” she said. “Would you mind the back table? By the kitchen door. It’s just easier.”
The place card two seats down from Rosaleen said FRANCINE.
In my handwriting.
I’d written all sixty-four of those cards at Rosaleen’s kitchen table, over three Tuesdays, while she told me which of her nieces could not be seated near each other.
Vicki picked mine up and handed it to me like a receipt.
Then Dane sat in my chair.
I went to the back.
Rosaleen saw the whole thing from the head table. She didn’t say a word. She just tapped two fingers on the arm of her wheelchair.
That was ours. It meant not yet.
Kelvin, the hall manager, came by with a bucket of ice around 3:30.
“Guy up front wants me to validate a garage ticket,” he said. “Says the hospice lady wouldn’t do it for him.”
“I’m not staff,” I said.
“I know you’re not.” He looked at me a second too long. “Your number’s the one on my contract.”
I shook my head at him.
Not yet.
The cake came out at four.
Dane tapped a fork on his glass before anybody else could, and took the microphone off the DJ’s stand like it came with his seat.
“I just want to say, Mom and me have been working on this since spring,” he said. “WE PUT THIS WHOLE THING TOGETHER. Because Grandma deserves the best, and family gives you the best.”
Vicki put her hand flat on her chest.
People clapped.
Bailey filmed it.
“And look, some of you know Grandma’s had a lot of strangers in her house lately,” Dane said. He was looking straight at the back table. “Nurses. Volunteers. People who get real friendly when there’s a WILL involved.”
Somebody laughed. One short one, then it stopped.
My face went hot down to my collar.
I had the folder in my purse.
Blue plastic, the kind with a snap. Two years of lists.
The menu she changed four times. The deposit slip. The song she wanted at the very end, written out twice because her hand shook the first time.
And the envelope she sealed in March and told me not to open, no matter what.
Rosaleen raised her hand.
Not high. She doesn’t raise anything high anymore.
But Kelvin saw it, and he turned the music all the way down.
Dane kept the microphone up by his mouth. “Grandma wants to say something. Go ahead, Grandma. Somebody help her.”
Vicki started to get up.
Rosaleen didn’t look at either one of them.
She looked down the whole length of that hall, past the cake, past the front table, past her own grandson, to the folding chair by the kitchen door.
“Francine,” she said.
Her voice is small now, but the room had gone quiet enough to hear it.
“Bring me the blue folder. And the ENVELOPE. You can open it NOW.”
Dane turned around with the microphone still in his hand.
His garage ticket was still lying on the gift table.
I picked up my purse and stood.
The head table
It’s a long way from the kitchen door of that hall to the head table. I walked all of it with sixty-three people turned around in their chairs.
I put the blue folder in Rosaleen’s lap. She laid both hands flat on top of it.
I held the envelope out to her. She pushed it back at me.
“You,” she said.
So I tore the end off, right there beside the cake.
Inside were three sheets of yellow legal paper, folded in thirds, all in her handwriting. Across the top of the first page she’d written To be read at my funeral. By Francine Nava. Nobody else.
It was her eulogy.
She’d written her own in March, and she’d given it to the one person in her life who wouldn’t read it early.
Dane leaned over my shoulder and got the top line before I could fold the page back.
“Oh, come on,” he said.
He still had the microphone up, so the whole room got it too.
“Grandma. That’s a funeral thing. You’re not dead.”
“I know,” Rosaleen said.
Vicki was halfway out of her chair. “Mom, let’s just do the cake. Everybody came for the cake.”
“They can have cake after,” Rosaleen said. “I want to hear how it sounds. I don’t get another chance at this.”
Bailey had her phone up again. Dane put his free hand over the lens, and she moved it out from under him and kept going.
Rosaleen looked at me and waited.
My hands were shaking, so the paper was too. I held it against the edge of the table to keep it still.
I read the first line the way she wrote it.
“My name is Rosaleen Garrison, and if you’re hearing this, Francine kept her word and I’m gone.”
A few people laughed, the nervous kind, because she was sitting right there with a slice of lemon cake in front of her.
Rosaleen nodded at me to keep going.
“Before anybody says anything nice about me,” I read, “I want to talk about the house.”
The Folgers can
The hospice gives you a binder before they give you a patient.
Josie, the volunteer coordinator, went through mine with me at a folding table in a back office that smelled like copier toner.
There are rules. You don’t take money from a patient and you don’t give them any. You don’t sign anything for them. You don’t read their mail.
You carry what they hand you, and you hand it where they say.
I’d been at it four years when Josie matched me with Rosaleen. She was my third.
She was eighty-eight. Her kidneys were going, and the doctors had told her about six months, which she thought was rude of them.
The first Tuesday, she had me sit at her kitchen table, and she slid a blue plastic folder across the oilcloth at me. She’d written NINETY on the front in black marker.
“I’m going to be ninety,” she said. “They don’t think so. We’ll plan it anyway, and if I’m wrong you can throw it out.”
That was the folder.
Her husband, Perry, had been a Knight of Columbus for forty-one years. His ring sat in a saucer on the windowsill over the sink, with a twist tie and two loose buttons.
She wanted the hall because of him.
“Perry would have a fit if I had it at the Elks,” she said.
Every couple of weeks there was mail from the bank, the thick kind with a window. She had me put those in the drawer under the phone without opening them.
“That’s the bank,” she said. “It’s not in any hurry. It’s got all the time in the world.”
In two years, I saw Dane twice.
The first time was Christmas. He came with Bailey and a bag of store rolls, and he went through the house room by room with his phone held up, taking pictures.
He asked his grandmother how old the furnace was.
She said she didn’t know.
He said it was probably about time for a new one, and he left with what was left of the ham.
The second time was the week in March.
That was the week the nurse took me out into the hallway and said weeks, maybe. Not months. Vicki drove up from Indianapolis on the Saturday. Dane came on the Sunday.
I wasn’t there for either one. I know what Rosaleen told me on Tuesday.
“He wanted to know if I’d made it airtight,” she said. “My will. He used that word. Airtight. Like it’s leftovers.”
Then she asked me for the legal pad.
She wrote for most of an hour. Three pages, with breaks to rest her hand on the table. When she was done, she folded them in thirds, put them in an envelope and ran packing tape over the flap twice.
“You don’t open that,” she said. “No matter what. Not if Vicki asks you. Not if Dane asks you. I’ll tell you when.”
I put it in the folder, behind the menu.
Then she had me get the Folgers can out of the back of the freezer.
It was full of cash, rolled up in rubber bands and cold enough to hurt my fingers. She counted nine hundred dollars out onto the oilcloth.
“That’s my going-away money,” she said. “Take this down to the Knights hall. There’s a man named Kelvin. He knows you’re coming.”
She’d filled out his form already and folded it in with the money. Every line but one.
“Put your phone number down as the contact,” she said. “Vicki doesn’t answer numbers she doesn’t know, and Dane answers everything.”
I knew what the binder said about money. I knew what it said about signing. I did both anyway, because she asked me with the can still in her lap.
Kelvin counted the cash twice in his office and wrote me out a deposit slip. I signed where his finger was.
I didn’t read the rest of the form. Carrying is the job. Reading isn’t.
She didn’t die in March.
She didn’t die in April either. In June the hospice certified her for another stretch, and she sat looking at the calendar on the side of her fridge for a long time.
“Well,” she said. “I guess we’re having a birthday.”
After that the menu changed four times. Prime rib, then ham, then chicken, then back to ham, because her niece in Galveston had married a man who didn’t eat chicken and she was not going to hear about it.
We did the place cards in September.
Back in the hall, the yellow paper had gone soft where my thumb was holding it.
The next line had Dane’s name in it.
The furnace
“I don’t own this house,” I read. “I signed it over to the bank in 2019, after Perry’s hospital bills, so I could stay in it until I die. They get it when I’m done. Vicki knows. She came with me to sign.”
Somebody at the church table set her coffee cup down hard enough to hear.
I kept going, because if I stopped I wasn’t going to start again.
“Dane, the furnace is from 1994. It belongs to the bank, same as the rest of it. You can stop taking pictures.”
Dane laughed.
It came out of the speakers too loud, and the DJ reached over and pulled the board down a notch without anybody asking him to.
“Okay,” Dane said. “Okay. This is a bit. Grandma’s doing a bit.”
Nobody laughed with him this time.
“There is a will,” I read. “It’s one page. Vicki gets my rosary and my good dishes. Dane gets Perry’s ring. Everything else already belongs to somebody, and it isn’t any of you.”
“A ring,” Dane said.
He said it into the microphone. I don’t think he meant to.
He turned to his mother. “Mom. Tell them.”
Vicki had her hand on her chest again. She took it down and put it in her lap.
“It was after Dad,” she said. “There wasn’t any other way to keep her in the house. It’s called a reverse mortgage. Lots of people do it.”
“You KNEW?”
“Honey, sit down.”
“Since 2019? You knew since 2019?”
“I didn’t think it was my business to tell you,” Vicki said. “It was hers.”
“You let me drive down here every—” He stopped.
Every what. He’d come twice.
Bailey lowered her phone an inch and looked at him over the top of it.
Dane swung around and looked at me instead. He was holding the microphone so tight the cord shook.
“Who wrote that?” he said. “Because that’s not my grandmother. My grandmother doesn’t talk like that.”
Vicki’s phone
“She’s on morphine,” Dane said to the room. “Everybody knows that, right? She’s on hospice. She’s on morphine. You sit with a drugged-up old lady for two years, you can get her to write anything you want.”
The man with the two watches looked at the floor.
“Give me that,” Dane said, and held his hand out for the paper.
“Leave it,” Rosaleen said.
He didn’t take it. He also didn’t put his hand down.
I could have read the next line. I didn’t. I turned around and held the three pages out to Vicki instead.
“It’s her handwriting,” I said. “You know her handwriting.”
That was my one idea, and I thought it was a good one.
Vicki took the pages. She looked at the first one for a long time. Her mouth moved a little over a word, the way people’s do when they recognize a hand they grew up reading on lunch bags.
“It’s hers,” she said.
“Mom—”
“It’s hers, Dane. Look at the R’s.”
Then she folded the pages in half and didn’t give them back.
“And I’d like to know,” Vicki said, “how a volunteer from the hospice ended up holding my mother’s will.”
“It isn’t a will,” I said.
“Whatever it is.”
She took her phone out of her purse. She held it the way you hold something you’re about to use.
“What’s your supervisor’s name?”
“Josie,” I said.
“Josie what.”
I told her.
“I’m not trying to make trouble,” Vicki said. “But I read the packet they gave us. You people have rules. No money. No paperwork. You’re not supposed to be in the middle of anything.”
She was right. I’d read the same packet. I’d carried nine hundred dollars in a Folgers can to the man ten feet from her, and signed his form.
The folder was still in Rosaleen’s lap. The deposit slip was in it. My name was on the deposit slip.
Dane saw my face. Whatever I did with it, he saw it.
“Who paid for this room?” he said.
“Dane,” Vicki said.
“No, I’m asking. Because somebody put money down on this hall, and the house is the BANK’S, apparently, so where’d it come from?” He turned and found Kelvin by the kitchen door with the ice bucket. “Hey. Kelvin. Who’s on the contract?”
Kelvin set the bucket down.
“Your grandmother,” he said.
“Who signed it?”
Kelvin didn’t answer that. He looked at me, and then he looked at Rosaleen.
Rosaleen tapped two fingers on the arm of her wheelchair.
I thought she meant me. I think now she meant him.
Kelvin went into his office and came back out with a clipboard.
Kelvin’s clipboard
He walked it the length of the hall the way I had, past the front table, past the cake.
He didn’t hand it to Dane. He held it out to Rosaleen.
“It’s your contract, Mrs. Garrison.”
She didn’t take it.
“Give it to Vicki,” she said. “She likes the paperwork.”
Vicki took it in the hand that wasn’t holding the eulogy. I was standing right next to her. I could read it from where I was, and for once in my life I did.
It was the form I’d carried in March. Rosaleen’s handwriting filled most of it, the R’s leaning over like they were tired.
Next to Event, she’d written Funeral luncheon.
Next to Date, she’d written To be set by family.
There was a ballpoint line through both. In the margin, in square printing, Kelvin had written Changed per R. Garrison by phone, June 11. Moved to her birthday. Same deposit.
Under Contact was my name, and my phone number, in my writing.
Under Paid it said $900, cash.
Vicki read the first line out loud. I don’t think she meant to either.
“Funeral luncheon,” she said.
Nobody in sixty-four chairs said anything.
Kelvin put his hands in his pockets.
“She came in through her volunteer in March,” he said. “Booked the funeral lunch. Paid it in cash, up front, so nobody’d have to. Then in June she called me and said she’d rather come to it.”
He shrugged. “So we moved it. Same room. Same deposit. Different cake.”
Rosaleen looked at me.
“Going-away money,” she said.
The can, cold enough to hurt. Nine hundred dollars on the oilcloth.
Then she turned her chair a little, so she was facing the room and not her family.
“There’s a plot at St. Patrick’s next to Perry,” she said. “He paid for it in 1988. Father will say the Mass. That’s all. There won’t be a hall after. I’m not paying for two of these.”
She lifted one hand off the folder and turned it over, at the chairs, the cake, the DJ.
“This is it,” she said. “You’re at it.”
Somebody at the church table started crying, quietly, into a paper napkin.
I looked at the gift table. The ticket was still there, next to their card.
I looked at the chair two seats down from Rosaleen, the one with no place card on it anymore, and Dane’s jacket on the back.
He’d stood up with a microphone at his grandmother’s funeral luncheon. He’d thanked himself for it. He’d told the room the woman who wrote the place cards was after the will.
And she’d been sitting right there in her lavender cardigan, getting all of it.
Rosaleen folded her hands back on the blue folder.
“So, Dane,” she said. “You gave the eulogy. How’d you think it went?”
The gift table
Dane didn’t put the microphone down. I’ve thought about that a lot since.
“You know what? No,” he said. “NO. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to set people up like this.”
The speakers popped on the P.
“I drove an hour and a half. I paid fourteen dollars to park in that garage. I stood up here in front of all these people and said nice things about you, and the whole time you had HER,” and he pointed at me with the microphone, “sitting on a funeral speech in her purse?”
“I asked her to,” Rosaleen said.
“Yeah, I bet you did.”
He turned in a circle, like he was looking for somebody in the room who’d take his side. The DJ looked at his laptop.
“You spent your funeral money on a PARTY,” Dane said. “You get that, right? Do you get that? So who buries you? Who pays for that? Me? Because Mom’s got nothing, and the house belongs to some bank in Ohio, apparently, and I’ve got a kid on the way and a truck payment.”
That was the first I’d heard about a baby. Bailey’s face said it was the first she’d heard him say it out loud, too.
“Perry paid for the ground,” Rosaleen said. “Nobody’s going to send you a bill.”
“Then what the hell did I drive down here for?”
It went out over the speakers, all the way to the kitchen door.
He heard it come back off the walls. I know he did, because his face changed in the middle of it, too late.
Nobody said anything.
Bailey put her phone face down on the table. It was the first time all afternoon I’d seen the back of it.
“Dane,” she said.
“What.”
“You’re still holding the microphone.”
He looked at it in his hand like somebody else had given it to him. Then he set it down on the cake table, next to the lemon cake, and the speakers thumped.
“Come on,” he said to Bailey. “We’re going.”
He walked past his grandmother’s wheelchair. Same as when he came in.
At the gift table he stopped and picked up his garage ticket. He held it out across the room to Kelvin, between two fingers.
“You validating this or not?”
“Garage takes cards,” Kelvin said.
Dane put the ticket in his shirt pocket and kept walking.
Bailey stood up slower. She came around the table, bent down, and put her hand on top of Rosaleen’s, on the folder.
“Happy birthday, Rosaleen,” she said.
It was the only thing I heard her say all day.
Then she went after him, and the door to the parking lot swung shut behind them both.
The Parting Glass
Vicki didn’t leave.
She sat back down in her chair at the head table with the contract in one hand and the eulogy in the other. She held them out to me without looking.
I took them.
“I’m still calling your office on Monday,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“It’s not personal.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
Rosaleen reached over and put her hand on my wrist.
“Read the last part,” she said.
The last page was the shortest. Her hand had gotten worse by the end of it. I had to hold it close.
“Francine Nava sat with me on Tuesdays,” I read. “She would not take one dollar, not even for gas, and I tried more than once. If anybody tells you she wanted something from me, they were not here on Tuesdays.”
I had to stop there for a second. Rosaleen waited.
“When this is done, play The Parting Glass. Nobody makes a speech after it. Eat something, then go home and call your mother if you’ve still got one.”
That was the end. Her name at the bottom, and the date in March.
I opened the folder in her lap and found the song. The two copies were stapled together, the first one shaky, the second one in a slow, careful print that must have taken her ten minutes.
I took them over to the DJ and set them down on his laptop.
He read them and nodded and found it on his phone.
It’s an old Irish song. A man’s voice and nothing else, for most of it.
It came on, and nobody made a speech.
Rosaleen lifted her two fingers off the arm of the wheelchair and held them up, just a little, so I could see.
Vicki got up and cut her mother a second piece of cake. She cut it small, the way Rosaleen likes it. She’d remembered that much.
The man with the two watches went and got the coffee pot and started filling cups at the church table without anybody asking.
When I came back, Dane’s jacket was gone from the chair two down from Rosaleen. He’d taken it on his way past. The seat was empty.
“Francine,” Rosaleen said. “That’s your chair.”
I still had the place card in my purse, where I’d put it when Vicki handed it to me.
I set it back up on the table where I’d put it the first time, and I sat down.
Tuesday
I called Josie at eight o’clock Monday morning, before Vicki could.
I told her about the can, the nine hundred dollars and the line on Kelvin’s form with my name on it. I told her I’d do it again.
“Then I have to take you off her,” Josie said.
“I know. I’m calling to quit.”
She was quiet a while.
“If you’re not ours anymore,” she said, “you can visit her as anybody you want.”
Vicki called her at nine-thirty. Josie told me that later, at the little coffee thing they had for me.
Four years. Three patients. The lanyard is in my kitchen drawer with the batteries and the takeout menus.
Tuesday I drove over to Rosaleen’s and parked on the street, out front, where it’s free.
She was at the kitchen table in the lavender cardigan. The folder was in front of her, empty except for the menu. Perry’s ring was still in the saucer on the windowsill.
Next to the sugar bowl she had the place card, the one that said FRANCINE in my handwriting.
She picked it up and pushed it across the oilcloth into my hand.
“That’s yours,” she said. “Put it where you sit.”
I stood it up in front of the chair across from her.
“Now sit,” she said. “And get the legal pad. I’m not done.”
If somebody you know sits with somebody on Tuesdays, send them this one tonight.
Family gatherings can bring out some astonishing behavior – there’s more in the catering-shift story where the groom’s mother ended up in the garage and the day Mom needed $2,400 and wouldn’t stop watching the truck. And for another family standoff, see the crayon truck trapped behind the pie table.
