Everything Changes

while Norm and Lela speak in hushed tones about God knows what on the living room couch. She’s not necessarily happy to see him, but there’s no trace of the antagonism and bitterness I would have expected from her. And rather than being pleased with this unforeseen turn of events, I find myself taking offense at the way she’s let him in so easily, while I’ve been struggling, for her sake, to keep Norm at bay. After years of indirectly nurturing the anger in me, she has wordlessly invalidated my acrimony by effortlessly letting go of her own. Having been anchored in her rage for my entire adult life, I am suddenly cast adrift, with no idea of what to do with my own ingrained resentments. And I know these are all selfish and petty emotions, so on top of everything else, I get to feel like an asshole.
    “What do you make of that?” I ask Matt, lobbing him the ball.
    “It’s fucked,” Matt says, his tone indicating that I’ll get no more from him. He leans back and tosses Pete a high fly.
    “Jeter’s under it,” Pete announces, exaggeratedly squatting to catch the ball. “And . . . he’s got it, and that will retire the side.” Pete has adjusted instantly to Norm’s return, like it’s been days, not years, since he saw him last.
    Lela steps out into the front yard while Norm uses the bathroom. “I don’t trust him,” she says to me.
    “You two seemed pretty chummy in there.”
    “I was being civil, Zack, that’s all,” she says wearily. “When you have children in common, there’s really no choice in the matter.”
    “If you say so.”
    “He looks awful,” she says.
    “He could lose a few pounds,” I say. “What do you mean you don’t trust him?”
    “There’s something ragged about him, a desperate look in his eyes. He’s up to something.”
    I shrug. “He wants us to forgive him.”
    She shakes her head, watching as Matt playfully tackles Pete to the ground, Pete’s ungoverned laughter ringing loudly across the yard. “It can’t be that simple. He’s got something up his sleeve. He wants something else.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because with Norm, there’s always something else,” she sighs. “Peter!”
    “Yes, Mom.”
    “You’re wagging your tongue again.”
    “Sorry, Mom.”
    “You’re a boy, not a dog.”
    “I’m not a boy—I’m a man.”
    She nods, a fond smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “I stand corrected.”
    Pete laughs and tosses me the ball, drawing me back into his and Matt’s game of catch. “Throw a pop fly,” he says.
    Norm steps out onto the porch, surveying the scene with unconcealed glee. “So,” he says. “Let’s go see a man about a car.” He’s so goddamn proud of himself, so transparent in his glee and determined to view this quotidian tableau as a personal triumph, and only a great measure of restraint stops me from trying to split his face open with a well-aimed hardball.

    Satch’s family owns the hardware store, and one would have hoped that a local merchant would have a greater sense of civic responsibility than to sell a car to Pete. In my memory, Satch is tall and beefy, with unruly dark hair and a threatening frown. In reality, the man finishing his cigarette underneath the store’s green awning is balding and dull faced and a good heel shy of six feet, but the hairy arms protruding from the rolled sleeves of his flannel shirt are corded with a telling topography of vein and sinew, and his Semper Fi tattoo pretty much nullifies whatever threat we may have imagined Matt’s scrawny, overly inked arms suggested. His remaining hair is crew-cut close, emphasizing his anvil of a head, his roughly hewn cheekbones suggesting that it would hurt just as much to hit him as to be hit by him.
    “Hey, Satch,” I say.
    “Zack, how are you,” he says, shaking my hand. “Long time.” His tone seems to indicate he’s been expecting me. “Listen,” he says, eyeing Matt and Norm leaning against the car in question, which Norm has parked illegally at the bus stop in front of the store. “Pete’s a good kid. Not for nothing, I even make a point to buy my shoes from him. I had the ‘for sale’ sign in that car for two weeks, and every day he would walk by and ask me to sell it to him, and I would laugh him off. But one day he comes in here with a check already made out to me, and he’s dead serious. Tells me he’s going to get his driver’s license. I mean, the kid can work in the shoe store, so why not a