The Ramp Where the Boat Used to Sit

Mom saw the boat before I did. I was watching the road for the turn onto her street, and she sat up straighter in the passenger seat and made a small sound in her throat, the kind you make when you touch a hot pan.

It was sitting in the driveway on a shiny trailer, right where her van was supposed to be.

It was a bass boat, brand new, with the plastic still taped over part of the console and the sun bouncing off the hull so bright I had to squint.

My stepfather, Rick Ostrander, stood beside it in his ball cap and his windbreaker. He had his hands in his pockets.

He did not wave, and he did not walk toward us, and right then I knew something was wrong before I knew what it was.

Mom leaned toward the open window. Her voice still dragged a little on the left side, where the stroke had pulled at her mouth. “Where’s my van, Rick?” she asked him.

He did not answer her. I pulled to the curb instead of into the drive, because there was no room in the drive, and sat there with the engine running, looking at that boat.

My mother is Debbie Ostrander. She is fifty-eight years old. She worked twenty-two years in the kitchen at the elementary school in our little town in central Nebraska, and she can still tell you which kids ate their green beans in 2009.

On a hot Saturday in late July she was canning tomatoes, and she dropped a quart jar on the kitchen floor.

Rick found her sitting in the juice and the broken glass, trying to tell him something with words that would not come out right.

The ambulance took her to the hospital in Kearney, forty minutes south.

They gave her the clot medicine in time, the doctor said, and that is the only reason she can talk to me at all. Her left arm and left leg did not come back the same.

She spent six weeks in rehab in Kearney after that. The insurance fought for every week of it, and the social worker fought back, and Mom fought hardest of anybody.

She learned to stand. She learned to pivot from a bed to a chair. She learned to hold a fork again.

I drove down every evening after work. I am a lineman for the public power district, though everybody out here still calls it the co-op.

I would come off a pole at four, shower at the shop, and be sitting in her room by six with a sack of something from the Runza.

In the second week, the therapists started talking about home. Mom would need a wheelchair for a long while, they said, maybe always for any distance.

She would need a vehicle she could roll into. She would need a ramp at the house.

“No stairs until spring at the earliest,” the head therapist told us, a tall woman named Kim with reading glasses on a string. “Maybe longer. I mean that. One fall on concrete and we start over, or worse.”

So Mom bought a van. She did it from her hospital bed, with her phone on the tray table and me reading the listings out loud to her because the small print still swam in front of her eyes.