Free Where Love Goes by Joyce Maynard Page B

water, but nothing kills them. Finally, with rubber gloves on, she scrapes them out and flushes them down the toilet. This is a day when the toilet flushes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Then his mother tries to work the plunger, but sometimes it’s no good.
    In spring their basement floods, and his mom has to run out and rent a sump pump. Pete stands at the top of the steps watching her in hip boots sloshing around in the dark, cold water, with boxes of Christmas ornaments and old school projects floating around her like little rafts.
    Moments like this Pete wishes he was a man. He would do something. He is ashamed and disgusted with himself to see his mom down in the basement like this, or up on the roof, or out in the freezing cold running jumper cables from her battery to their neighbor’s when their car won’t start. He hates it that she’s the one who has to bury their cat when he gets hit by a car, and catch the bat that gets into Sally’s room in the middle of a slumber party of screaming girls. In April, a few weeks before baseball sign-up, when she hears him talking about all the competition in senior league for pitching positions, she offers to catch for him. She means well, but there’s no way she could catch his pitches. Your dad does that, not your mom.
    She tries hard. Every spring she buys tickets to Fenway Park just for the two of them. Sitting in the bleachers beside her, Pete looks around. Every other kid he sees has come with a dad. Either that or both parents.
    She doesn’t understand the game. When one of the Red Sox hits a pop-up, she cheers, evidently thinking—because it goes so high—it must be a really great hit. She’s always surprised when the outfielder catches one of these type of hits, which he always does, of course. “Gee,” she says, “I thought that was a homer for sure, didn’t you? It looked like that one was headed straight over the green monster.”
    A couple months back—Sally’s prom night—the two of them sat on the porch after she drove off with Travis, Claire sipping her coffee, Pete with a mug of hot chocolate. “I know I should be past all this,” his mom said, snuggling up to him on the porch swing, “but just once I’d like some handsome prince to come along and whisk me away to the ball. Pretty silly, huh?”
    He can’t do anything about that. In fact, on the rare occasions when somebody has shown up to whisk his mother off (usually just to the movies, or some restaurant in town), the guy was nothing like a prince. Pete knows he is never very polite to these men. He knows his mother wishes he would be more pleasant. But they’re just such geeks. Why does she need to go out on dates, anyway?
    But it’s no good when she stays home all the time either. She gets grouchy and mad. She’s always yelling at him to pick up his room and mop the kitchen floor, but really, he figures, she’s just sad about other stuff. Money for instance.
    When Pete hears his mother cry, he would do anything to make her stop. He has been listening to these ads they have on the radio about the Mega Bucks lottery. Every week the jackpot keeps getting bigger. Somebody’s got to win soon.
    “Imagine the feeling,” the song goes, on the radio. “Imagine it was you.”
    So he does. He imagines it was his mom, because he would give all the money to her. All except a couple hundred dollars for a dirt bike, or maybe a Jet Ski.
    They would go to Club Med, the one his friend Jared has told him about where you get to ride go-karts and learn to fly on the trapeze. There would be yoga classes for his mom, and drinks with parasols in them, and scuba diving.
    They would buy a Range Rover and a jukebox and a CD-ROM. His mom would hire a cleaning person to wash all the dishes and do the vacuuming. She would never have to look at another maggot again. Anytime something broke she wouldn’t even think about trying to fix it. She’d just call a handyman. Maybe she’d even keep one on staff, full