Fly Me to the Moon

Начало книги

“Good afternoon, Mr. Smith,” I said as I plopped my backpack on an extra chair in the Lakewood Retirement Center’s dining room.

The white-haired gentleman looked up from his coffee and riveted his eyes on me like a security guard verifying my identity. I saw by the relaxing of his shoulders that I was recognized, and that he’d read my nametag. “Good to see you, George,” he said. “I wish you wouldn’t call me Mr. Smith. Makes me feel old.” He smiled at his own joke. I didn’t know his exact age, but I guessed he was in his late eighties.

“Okay, Bob,” I said, returning his smile and adding a wink. We went through this same routine every day when I arrived for work as a volunteer caregiver. On one of my earliest visits, he surveyed the dining room as if looking for spies and whispered that Bob Smith was a fake name. He explained that he couldn’t tell me his real name because the press (he never called them news media) might find out. I promised not to reveal his secret. I suspected he was an actor whose family wanted to hide him from the paparazzi. They had done a good job of it—or maybe he’d had plastic surgery? In any case, I hadn’t been able to figure out who he really was. All the staff would tell me was that he had checked in after his wife died in a car crash in the late 2020s. He had some grandchildren and great-grandchildren, even great-great-grandchildren, but I was his only regular visitor. New treatments had slowed down the progression of his Alzheimer’s disease, but I wondered how long it would be before he forgot that Bob Smith wasn’t his real name?

Читать дальше →