When my mother makes her bed these days, she leaves my father’s side alone. Pillow with his head dent, covers swirled in whatever pattern his legs left. And except for the tiny wrapped box that sits there now, day after day, nothing has changed at all. 

My mother says that when my father comes home from the hospital, she wants him to see that things are exactly the same. 

It’s been two months. The ones with Thanksgiving and Christmas. The snow fell even though it knew my father wasn’t here to shovel. 

Stroke and then coma and then life support. A kind of plastic snake has crawled into my father through his mouth. It makes my father’s chest go up and down and up and down. My mother insists that my father is just sleeping a lot, arms folded across his chest, the way he always did in front of the TV, and that life support is just the doctors’ way of “covering their asses.” My mother never said “asses” when my father was home. That’s something which has changed.

My mother is wearing the kind of housedress she had on the day of my father’s stroke, flowers and dots of spaghetti sauce. Her gray roots are nearly an inch grown out. I ask her if she wants to come with me to the hospital, same as every day. She shakes her head, same as every day. “I don’t want to see ‘that thing,’” she says. 

It breathes for him, I tell her, and she acts like she doesn’t hear me. 

“He might squeeze your hand,” I say. “That way he knows you’re there.”

My mother only went to the hospital that one time. “He’s not there,” she says. “That wasn’t him.”

My mother bought my father a golden key fob for Christmas. He’s wanted one every year since I can remember, and my mother always called it foolish when they had a mortgage and food to buy. This particular Christmas was different, she told me, and everything else could wait. She bought the key fob the day he went into the hospital, had it placed in a special wooden box, with etchings, and it smells like forest wood, all pine and rain-soaked. Then she wrapped the whole thing in silver paper, tied it with a red satin bow. She placed it in the dent of my father’s pillow. It’s so shiny, almost alive. I swear it looks as if, any moment, it could take a breath.