Bad Girl Reputation by Elle Kennedy

“Nah, I’m good. I picked up a shift volunteering at the seniors’ home. The lady on the phone said old folks love dogs, so I’m bringing Daisy.”

“Is that like a euphemism for something?” she asks, laughing as she turns to Cooper for the punchline.

My brother looks as bewildered as his girlfriend sounds. “If it is, I don’t know what it’s code for.”

“Alright, gotta run. Oh, by the way,” I tell Cooper, “I’m taking your truck.” Then I slap the door shut before he can respond.

I can only imagine the conversation they’re having in my wake. Has Evan gone nuts? Obviously he’s not volunteering anywhere, right?

Well, joke’s on them, because I certainly fucking am. My last conversation with Gen, followed by my chat with Billy the other night, got me thinking about what “getting my life together” actually looks like. Truth be told, I hadn’t thought my life was so scattered to begin with. It’s not as if I’m a total deadbeat. I’ve got a job—my own business, partly. I have a house and a motorcycle. An old Jeep I spend more time fixing up than driving.

Plenty of people I grew up with around here aspired to a lot less. And a lot of people would have put money on me ending up a lot worse. Still, if all that isn’t enough for Gen, fine. I can do better. She thinks I can’t change? Watch me.

Starting today, I’m hella upstanding. Easing up on the drinking. No more fights. I’m officially on a mission of self-improvement, a complete Good Boy retrofit. Which, according to Google, includes volunteer work.

So bring on the seniors.

At the nursing home, Daisy is psyched at all the new, weird smells. Her little tail excitedly smacks the linoleum floor as she tugs on her leash, anxious to explore, while I check in at the front desk and introduce myself.

A volunteer coordinator named Elaine meets me in the lobby, offering a broad smile in greeting. “Evan! Nice to meet you in person! We always appreciate visitors.” She shakes my hand before sinking to one knee to greet Daisy. “And we love having pretty girls around!”

I watch as the middle-aged woman fawns over Daisy, scratching behind her ears and dodging that tongue that just last night got into the garbage again.

This dog doesn’t even understand how easy she’s got it.

“Yeah, well, we like to give back,” I say, then regret how skeezy it sounds coming from me.

Elaine takes us on a tour of the two-story facility. Honestly, it’s less creepy than I imagined. I had pictured something at a cross between hospital and asylum, but this place isn’t spooky at all. No one is wandering around dead-eyed in a nightshirt muttering to themselves. It simply looks like a condo building with hospital handrails on the walls.

“We underwent a major renovation a few years ago. We have a full-service restaurant that serves three meals every day, plus a café and coffee shop where our residents can grab a snack and sit with friends. Of course, for our less mobile residents, we deliver meals to their rooms.”

Elaine proceeds to tell me about activities they organize as we pass one of the community rooms, where the old folks are sitting around easels, painting. Apparently, this is where most of my volunteer hours will be spent.

“Do you have any special skills or talents?” she asks. “Play an instrument, maybe?”

“Uh, no, nothing like that, I’m afraid.” I did spend a few months in middle school thinking I might take up the guitar, but that shit’s complicated. “I can build stuff, mostly. Just about anything.”

“Crafts, then,” she says with a placating smile that I choose to ignore. “And of course, our residents enjoy when four-legged friends come by. So we can set up a schedule for that as well.”

Down one of the residential halls, Elaine pokes her head in an open door with a quiet knock. “Arlene, may we come in? You have a special visitor.”

Arlene, a tiny pixie of a white-haired woman, sits in a recliner watching her television. She waves us in with a frail hand that looks like it might snap off if she moves too quickly. But she’s smiling the second her cloudy eyes land on Daisy.

“Arlene, this is Evan and Daisy. They’ll be volunteering here,” Elaine says. “Arlene is one of our favorite residents. She’s going to outlast all of us, isn’t that right?”

Then, like shoving a kid into the deep end of the pool to make him figure out how to swim, Elaine abandons Daisy and me to the whims of Arlene and the Weather Channel.

“You better bring the car into the garage, Jerry,” Arlene says to me, while petting Daisy, who has hopped up in her lap now. “TV says it’s going to rain.”

I don’t respond at first, confused. But as she keeps chatting up a storm, it quickly becomes evident she thinks I’m someone named Jerry. Her husband, I take it.

I’m clueless about nursing home etiquette, so I’m not sure if I’m allowed to sit on the edge of the old lady’s bed. But there’s only one chair in the room, and Arlene is sitting in it. So I remain standing, awkwardly sliding my hands in my back pockets.

“Is your brother still up north?” she asks after the weather guy remarks on a line of severe thunderstorms moving up the New England coast. “You should make sure he replaced those gutters like you told him to, Jerry. He doesn’t want more leaks like last season.”