Free Everything Changes by Jonathan Tropper

engagement, she’s had her teeth professionally whitened, started wearing contact lenses again, and has been experimenting with different shades of blond hair coloring. I don’t want to discuss my mother in sexual terms, but the fact is she’s still a good-looking woman, slim and well proportioned, with soft skin and pale blue eyes, and your average sixty-year-old man wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. My mother wants to look beautiful at the wedding; she wants to dance and laugh and charm people as she once did, a lifetime ago. And the idea that those desires are still alive somewhere in her should thrill me, but instead it just makes me feel guilty and sad, because it’s like she’s allowing herself only the briefest visit to the life she might have been leading if she hadn’t shut herself down so many years ago.
    “You want something to eat?” she asks me.
    “No, thanks,” I say. I’m already eyeing the door, looking for my opportunity.
    “We had spaghetti and meatballs,” Pete informs me, plopping down into a kitchen chair.
    “I’ve eaten already.”
    “You were at Tamara’s?” she asks me.
    “Yeah.”
    She is unable to conceal her disapproval. She finds it dangerously inappropriate for me to be spending time with Rael’s widow, but thankfully, she’s unwilling to navigate the terrain of his death with me, so she has no choice but to leave it alone.
    “Tamara’s a hottie,” Pete says enthusiastically.
    “Don’t be fresh, Peter,” she says.
    “She is,” he argues. “You could bounce a quarter off her ass.”
    “That’s enough!” my mother snaps at him.
    “Come on, Mom,” I say. “He’s just repeating something he heard. He doesn’t even know what it means.” But I do, and it takes me a moment or two to banish the image of Tamara’s naked backside from my mind.
    “It means she’s tight,” Pete says, and we both laugh while our mother sighs exasperatedly.
    “Listen,” I say. “I have to go.”
    “You just got here,” Pete complains.
    “Your brother’s very busy.” She says it to Peter, but it’s aimed at me, right between the eyes.
    “Matt’s playing at Kenny’s Castaways tonight,” I say. “You want to come?” My invitation doesn’t start out sincere, but suddenly it is, and I want badly for both of them to come, for Saint Mom to put on a dress and some makeup and for her and Peter to squeeze into Jed’s tiny Lexus with me and come into the city, for us to be like a TV family. I’ll put the top down, and Mom will laugh as her hair whips around her head, and Pete will close his eyes and plant his face in the wind, and we’ll sing along to an oldies station, and with the speed of the car and the open air, I’ll be able to love them without suffocating. But even as I think it, I know it will never happen. The last spontaneous thing my mother did was to set fire to her husband’s bedspread almost twenty years ago, and Pete is scared of crowds and tends to act up.
    “Tell Matt I said hi,” Pete says.
    “Will do,” I say.
    “I’ll pack up some meatballs for Matt,” my mother says. “He’s really much too skinny.”
    As I kiss her good-bye, she pulls me close, gently grabbing a fistful of my hair. “You’re not yourself,” she says softly, looking me in the eye.
    “Neither are you.”
    She nods, and offers up a wry, apologetic smile. “I’ve got my list of lame excuses,” she says. “What’s yours?”
    I shake my head. “I’m fine, Ma, really,” I say. “Don’t worry.”
    She kisses my cheek and then lets go of me. “I have to,” she says. “It’s the only thing you’ll let me do for you.”
    Pete steps out with me onto the darkness of the porch, and asks if he can drive the Lexus. I sit in the passenger seat as he pilots us slowly around the block, his hands at ten and two, signaling each left turn far in advance, his face a mask of rapturous concentration in the ambient glow of the dashboard. I’m filled with an