OTTERS SAVED FROM DEATH

Lisbeth’s son pulled up to the curb, unannounced, to find both garage doors open. The snow blower, too heavy for her to push, was in the driveway, as was his fathers old electric wheelchair. Two-thirds of the three car garage were devoted to file boxes, plastic shelves loaded with Wal-Mart hauls of paper towels, cleaning supplies, and 2-liter bottles of soda; in addition were folding walkers with cut tennis balls for feet; a ramp into the house that she had built for his father, but that his father had never left the hospital to see; a library cart dense with books; blue trash bins. His mother stood at the center, picking up objects from the top and replacing the carefully to keep the entire pile from shifting.

He said hello for a second time.

“What are you doing,” he asked, stepping onto the ramp that led into the house. He drove up to watch the Green Bay game. He didn’t have reception himself, and didn’t want to sit at a bar alone, drinking beers and trying not to get drunk.

“Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just tired of being alone.”

He stood on the ramp, unsure of what to say to that. Eventually he went in and turned on the game. The dogs, Millie and Winnie, were excited to see him and he scratched their heads on the way to the television. The game started in the Green Bay cold, but the field was green and the flurries that could barely be drifting across the camera lens were supposed to pass. Ten minutes game time later, though, the field was white, with shuffling footprints where players grappled at the line. He had asked his mother, “Don’t you want to watch the game?” She had replied that she didn’t know, she would go upstairs and read. The snow fell in clumps, obscuring yard markers and swallowing movement. He even failed to notice his mother, who sat down in the big chair, until she talked to him about neighbors he didn’t know and the latest signs of senility in her mother. The book was in her lap.