Everything Changes

staring wistfully at his door, wishing for a patient like you.
    My mother and Peter live about a half mile away from Tamara, in the house I grew up in, the house from which Norm was ceremoniously ejected after the Anna incident. Said ceremony actually happened a few days after Norm was gone, when my mother brought the soiled linens from the crime scene down to the driveway and, using a can of lighter fluid, set them ablaze underneath our basketball hoop. The burn marks on the concrete became our foul line and out-of-bounds indicators.
    Peter’s on the front lawn raking leaves. When he sees me, his eyes light up and he waves with just enough abandon to reveal his condition. “Hey, Zack,” he yells. “What’s new and exciting?”
    “Hey, Pete,” I say, climbing out of the car. “How’s it hanging?”
    “A little to the left,” he says with a giggle. “Sweet ride.”
    “You know it.”
    He drops the rake and runs down the small slope of lawn to greet me, his arms dangling behind him in the awkward body language of the mentally impaired. His kiss is wet on my cheek, and his stubble leaves a mild burn as it scrapes my skin. He’s twenty-nine years old, short and stocky, bright in his own way, and as eager to please as a puppy. But no matter how happy Pete seems, no matter how well he lives in the aftermath of the chromosomal car wreck that took place during his creation, there’s still an undeniable element of tragedy to his life. Every day, for him, is like trying to play the piano wearing oven mitts. “I missed you,” he says, and I feel a stab of guilt and make a mental note to call him more and spend the random Sunday with him doing brotherly things. Loving the mentally challenged means never feeling completely guilt free.
    “I missed you too,” I tell him, throwing my arm around his shoulder as we walk back up the lawn. “That’s why I came to see you.”
    “How’s Hope?” he says.
    “She’s great. She said to say hi.”
    “Tell her I said hello.”
    “I will.”
    For just a moment, as I feel the cold, crisp air against my face, the wind against my brown suede jacket, the brittle multihued leaves being crushed under my rubber soles, I feel a surge of optimism, a sense of the wide range of possibilities. Autumn can do that to me.
    My mother is in the kitchen, scrubbing dishes in the sink. She has a perfectly good dishwasher, but to use it would be less of a dramatic sacrifice on behalf of Peter, so it’s not an option. Caring for Peter has never been enough for her. Over the years she’s developed a finely honed martyr complex, and she isn’t satisfied that her work is being done if some form of self-flagellation isn’t stirred into the mix. I was too young at the time to know whether this trend developed before or after my father’s final transgression, if it was an effect or a cause of their marital woes, but it’s certainly the reason she’s remained alone. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, or some misdirected Zen acceptance of her lot in life; I don’t know. I’m the last one qualified to figure out someone else’s psychoses. Suffice it to say that Lela King, generally speaking, is no barrel of laughs. My brother Matt wrote a song about her called “Saint Mom.”
    From the back, with her trim figure, jeans, and bleached blond hair, she looks like a much younger person. But then she turns to face me, wearing her customary expression of weary martyrdom, and in an instant I take in the creases below her eyes, the slack jaw, and the now ingrained purse of her lips, and I want to hug her and say something that will make her smile even as I struggle to repress the urge to flee this dreary brown kitchen, still decorated in the avocado wallpaper of my childhood, and never come back. My mother can do that to me.
    “Zack,” she says.
    “Hey, Ma.”
    She turns off the sink and holds her rubber-gloved hands theatrically away from me as I lean to kiss her cheek.
    “What are you doing here?”
    “I was just in the neighborhood,” I say.
    She gives me a stern look. “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Don’t give me nothing. What is it?”
    Just so we’re clear, my mother is not this bastion of maternal intuition, instantly gleaning, like a mother hen, that something’s wrong in the universe of her eldest and, on the surface anyway, least screwed-up son. Her middle son was rendered brain damaged by a freak genetic mutation and her husband fucked his secretary on her side of