“Ted, your mother’s having another fit”
A small gray rabbit hopped along the sidewalk to a clay flower pot near Ted’s lawn chair. Inside the clay pot, twelve red azalea blossoms burst from a patchwork of stems and leaves. Ted reached out with his foot as the rabbit’s quivering body inched toward the flowers. As the rabbit hopped into the clay pot, Ted tapped the pot with his heel. The rabbit hopped out of the clay pot and scurried down the sidewalk.
As Ted raised a can of beer to his lips, the apartment door behind him swung open, and his wife Martha, a middle-aged woman with short blond hair, leaned out of the apartment. “Ted, your mother’s having another fit,” she said.
Ted placed his beer in the lawn chair cup holder. As the door closed behind him, he slowly raised himself out of the lawn chair.
In the guest bedroom of the apartment, an old woman lay on a bed with a colorful quilted blanket stretched over her. On the bookshelf beside the bed, a computer tracked her vitals from electrodes placed beneath her gown. Beside the bed lay an oxygen tank and a pump. As Ted entered the room, the pump thundered to a start, pumping pure oxygen through a clear plastic tube that ran from the tank to the tracheotomy in her throat. He took a seat in the folding chair beside the bed. “Mom,” he asked, “what’s wrong?”
His mother Alma turned toward him and raised her right hand off the bed. Ted grasped her small frail hand. She squeezed his hand gently, staring up at him. He smiled warmly at her. She glanced at the notebook on the night stand. He picked up the notebook and a pen from the night stand and placed them both on the bed beside her. She released his hand, and wrote this in the notebook: “I can’t see your father.”
On the shelf beside the bed, a picture frame was lying on its back. Ted picked it up. He glanced at the portrait of his father in the frame, a man with the same short gray hair and pale blue eyes that he had. He stood the frame up on the nightstand facing Alma.
