Read Online Everything Changes by Jonathan Tropper - Free Book Online Page B

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 the bed, and she lives every day with the unshakable, theistic conviction that God isn’t through dicking with her. Some people say hello. Lela King says “What’s wrong?”
    “Everything’s fine, Mom. I’m just passing by.”
    “Is it Hope?”
    “Is what Hope?”
    “You’re not getting cold feet, are you? Because that’s perfectly normal.”
    “Ma.”
    “I’m just saying.” She shrugs and frowns. The Eskimos have a hundred words for snow; my mother has a thousand ways to shrug and frown. She could give seminars.
    My impending wedding looms totemic in her mind. As far as I know, she doesn’t have much of a social calendar, and the wedding has unaccountably stirred a long-dormant vanity in her. I know she’s been clipping pages from fashion magazines on gowns, hair, and makeup, has been preparing a virtual folio of options for herself. She claims she doesn’t want to embarrass me, but we both know that’s a crock. Since my