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  Fat Charley brings me the pancake tower with a lit sparkler on top. He sings “Happy Birthday to You” in a hoarse voice, waiting for Mom to join in, but all she does is shoot the pancake tower an angry glance. So I sing with him instead. “How old are you?” Charley asks. “Fifty,” I say. “Fifty years old and still celebrating with your mom?” He gives an appreciative whistle, and goes on, “I envy you, Mrs. Piekov. My daughter is half his age and she hasn’t wanted to celebrate her birthday with us for ages. We’re too old for her.”

  “What does your daughter do?” Mom asks without taking her eyes off the pile of pancakes on my plate. “I don’t exactly know,” Charley admits, “something in high tech.”

  “My son is fat and unemployed,” Mom says in a half whisper, “so don’t be so quick to envy me.”

  “He’s not fat,” Charley mumbles, trying to smile. Compared with Charley, I’m really not fat. “I’m not unemployed, either,” I add, my mouth full of pancakes. “Sweetie,” Mom says, “organizing my pills in a box for two dollars a day doesn’t qualify as a job.”

  “Congratulations!” Charley says to me. “Enjoy your meal and congratulations!” and backs slowly away from our table as if retreating from a growling dog. When Mom goes to the restroom, Charley comes back. “I want you to know,” he says, “that you’re doing a really good deed. By living with your mom and everything. After my father died, my mother lived alone. You should have seen her. She burned out faster than the sparkler on your pancakes. Your mother can gripe till tomorrow, but you’re keeping her alive, and that’s a good deed right out of the Good Book. ‘Honor thy father and thy mother.’ How are the pancakes?”

  “Fantastic,” I say, “too bad I can’t come here more often.”

  “If you’re in the neighborhood, you’re always welcome to drop in,” Charley says, and winks at me. “I’ll be glad to give you more. Free of charge.” I don’t know what to say, so I just smile and nod. “Really,” Charley says, “it would make me happy. My daughter hasn’t eaten my pancakes for years, she’s always on a diet.”

  “I’ll come,” I tell Charley, “I promise!”

  “Great,” Charley says, nodding, “and I promise not to say a word about it to your mother. Scout’s honor.”

  On the way home, we stop at a 7-Eleven, and Mom says that because it’s my birthday, I can choose one thing as a present. I want a bubble-gum-flavored energy drink, but Mom says I’ve had enough sugar for one day, so I ask her to buy me a lottery ticket. But she says that, on principle, she’s against gambling because it teaches people to be passive, and instead of doing something to change their own destiny, all they do is sit on their fat behinds and wait for luck to save them.

  “You know what the chances are of winning the lottery?” she asks. “One in a million, even less. Just think about it: We have a better chance of being killed in a car accident on the way home than you do of winning.” After a brief silence, she adds, “But if you insist, I’ll buy one for you.” I insist and she buys it for me. I fold the lottery ticket twice, once along the width and once along the length, and shove it into the small front pocket of my jeans. My dad died in a car accident on the way home a long time ago, when I was still in my mother’s womb, so go figure.

  At night, I want to watch the basketball game. The Golden State Warriors are really good this year. That Stephen Curry is so hot on the three-point shots, I’ve never seen anything like it. He shoots without even looking at the basket, and the balls drop into the hoop one after the other. Mom won’t let me. She says she read in TV Guide that there’s a special about the poorest places in the world on National Geographic. “Can’t you skip it for me?” I ask, “after all, today’s my birthday.” But Mom insists that my birthday started yesterday and ended at sunset, so now it’s just a regular day.

  While Mom watches the program, I go into the kitchen and organize her pills in the box. She takes more than thirty pills a day. Ten in the morning and twenty-something at night. Pills for blood pressure, cholesterol, her heart, her thyroid. So many pills that just swallowing them all makes you full. Really, I don’t think there’s a disease in the world she doesn’t have. Except for AIDS, maybe. And lupus. After I finish organizing the pills in the box, I sit down next to her on the couch and watch the program with her. They’re showing a humpbacked kid who lives in the poorest neighborhood in Calcutta. At night, before he goes to sleep, his parents tie him with a rope so he’ll sleep bent over. That way, the narrator explains, his hump will get bigger, and when he grows up, it’ll make people feel really sorry for him and give him a strong advantage in the tough competition with other beggars in the city. I’m not someone who cries a lot, but that kid’s story is really sad.

  “You want me to switch to basketball?” Mom asks in a soft voice, and ruffles my hair. “No,” I say, wiping my tears with my sleeve and smiling at her, “this is an interesting program.” It really is an interesting program. “I’m sorry I said mean things about you in the diner,” she says. “You’re a good boy.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, and kiss her on the cheek, “it didn’t bother me at all.”

  The next morning, I go to the eye doctor with Mom. He shows her a chart with letters on it and asks her to read them out loud. She shouts the letters she can see and insists on guessing the ones she doesn’t, as if a lucky guess will help cure her. The doctor adds another pill to her collection, to be taken once a day, for the glaucoma. After the doctor, we go to Walgreens to buy the new pill, and so I won’t forget, I add it to the box in the compartment for the night pills as soon as we get home. Then I change into my tracksuit, take my basketball, and go out to the children’s court. I’m not a great player, but if the kids there are young enough, they’re sure I’m a god.

  A few years ago, I had a run-in with a redheaded mother with tattoos who got stressed because I was playing with her son. The minute she saw me on the court with him, she told me in a really loud voice that I shouldn’t dare touch him. I explained to her that, according to the rules of basketball, you’re allowed to touch an opponent when you’re guarding him, and that she had nothing to worry about, I knew I was bigger and stronger than her cute little son, and anyway, even when I’m guarding, I do it carefully. But instead of listening, she got even angrier. “And don’t you dare call my son ‘cute,’ you pervert,” she screamed, and threw her paper cup of coffee right in my face. Luckily for me, the coffee was lukewarm, but still, it stained my clothes.

  After that incident, I didn’t go back there for a few months, but then the playoffs started, and when you see good games, it makes you want to play, too. At first, I was afraid the redhead with the tattoos would be at the court and would start screaming again, so I asked Mom if we could buy a basket of our own and hang it in the yard. That was the first time I told Mom about what had happened on the basketball court, and she got very quiet, the way she always does when she’s really mad. Then she told me to put on my tracksuit and take my basketball, and we left the house.

  On the way to the court, she told me that all the parents of the children who play with me there should thank me because there aren’t many grown-ups in the world who still have enough gentleness and goodness in them to play like I do with children and teach them things.

  “Sweetie,” she said, her voice cracking, “when we get to the court, if you see that stupid tattooed monkey again, you tell me, okay?” I nodded, but in my heart, I was praying that the tattooed redhead wouldn’t be there, because I knew that even if Mom is old, she could easily smash that woman’s head with her cane.

  When we reached the court, Mom sat down on a bench and checked out all the other parents like a bodyguard trying to spot an assassin. At first, I had an empty half-court to myself, and just dribbled and shot baskets alone, but very quickly the kids on the other half of the court asked me to join them because they were missing a player. At the end of the game, when I made the winning basket, I looked over at Mom, who
was still sitting on the bench, pretending to be reading something on her cell phone, and I knew she’d seen everything and was proud.

  When I reach the court, there are no kids there and I just take some lazy shots that miss the basket, but after about fifteen minutes, I get bored. Fat Charley’s Diner is barely a five-minute walk away, and when I get there, it’s almost empty and Charley is really glad to see me. “Hey, hoop star,” he says, “were you playing basketball?” I shrug and tell him that no one was on the court. “It’s still early,” he says, and winks at me, “but by the time you finish the mountain of pancakes I’m going to make you, there will definitely be a few people there.” Charley’s pancakes are really fantastic. When I finish eating, I thank him and ask again if he’s sure it’s okay for me to eat there without paying. “Whenever you want, hoop star,” he says. “The pleasure is all mine.”

  “And you won’t tell my mom about the pancakes, right?” I ask him before I leave. “Don’t worry,” Charley says, laughing and patting his big stomach, “your secret is buried deep in my potbelly.”

  The big lottery drawing takes place on Saturday nights. Mom reminds me about it right after she takes her pills. “Are you in suspense?” she asks. I shrug. She tells me again that my chance of winning is less than one in a million, and then asks what I would do if I did happen to win. I shrug again and say that I would definitely send some of the money to that humpbacked kid we saw on TV. Mom laughs and says that the film was made more than ten years ago and it’s very possible that the humpbacked kid is now a humpbacked grown-up and he’s begged so much that he doesn’t need favors from anyone. Or maybe he died from one of those diseases those people get because they don’t wash their hands.

  “Never mind the children from National Geographic,” she says, and ruffles my hair the way I like her to, “what would you want for yourself?” I shrug again because I really don’t know. “If you win, you’ll probably move to a big place of your own and buy a season ticket to sit in the VIP box for all the Warriors games and you’ll hire a stupid Filipina to organize my medications instead of you,” Mom says, giving me a not very happy smile. I actually like organizing Mom’s pills for her; it relaxes me. “I don’t like going to games,” I say. “Remember when we went to visit Uncle Larry in Oakland and he took me to a game? We stood in line for almost an hour and the ushers at the entrance yelled at everyone who went inside.”

  “Then no season ticket,” Mom says. “So what do you think you’d buy?”

  “Maybe a TV for my room,” I say, “but a really big one, not like the one we have in the living room.”

  “Sweetie,” Mom laughs, “the first prize is sixty-three million dollars. If you win, you’ll have to think of something else besides a large-screen TV.”

  This is my first time ever watching a lottery draw. There’s a kind of transparent machine full of Ping-Pong balls and each ball has a number on it. The woman operating the machine is blond and she smiles nervously the whole time. Mom says that her bust isn’t real and you can see right away that she’s had Botox injections, because nothing on her forehead moves. Then Mom says she has to go to the bathroom. This year, she’s developed a serious problem with her bladder, and that’s why she has to go to the bathroom pretty much every half hour. “Good luck, sweetie. If you see that you’ve won while I’m peeing, give a yell and I’ll run out with my underpants down,” she says with a laugh, and gives me a kiss before she gets up from the couch. “But don’t yell for no reason, you hear me? You remember what the doctor said about my heart.”

  The blond with the nervous smile presses a button that turns on the machine. I look at her forehead. Mom’s right, nothing moves there. The first ball that drops out of the machine has the number 46 on it, which is the number of our house. The second one has the number 30, which is the age Mom was when my dad died and I was born. The third ball has the number 33, which is the number of pills Mom took every day before she got the prescription for the glaucoma pill, and the last ball has the number 1, which is the number of sparklers Charley lit on my pancake tower. It’s weird how all the numbers the blond with the frozen forehead chooses are connected to my life and Mom’s, and how all those numbers are written on my ticket. I don’t even check the two other numbers, I just keep thinking about what could make a woman inject herself with stuff that paralyzes her forehead and how sad it would be if Mom and I had to live in separate houses instead of together.

  When Mom comes back to the couch, I’m already watching the sports channel, but she insists that we switch to Fox because it’s time for the evening news broadcast. The newscasters talk about a suicide bombing in Pakistan that killed sixty-seven people. They don’t mention the name of the city where the bombing happened, and I just hope it isn’t Calcutta. Mom explains to me that Calcutta is in India and Pakistan is a different country, even worse than India. “The things that people do to each other,” she says as she gets up and starts walking slowly toward the kitchen. Terror attacks on TV always make her hungry. Mom asks if I want her to make scrambled eggs for our dinner and I tell her I’m hungry, but not for eggs. “Want the last slice of the crumb cake I baked you for your birthday?” she calls from the kitchen. “You’ll let me eat something sweet even though it’s nighttime already?” I ask. Usually she’s very strict about things like that. “Today’s a special day,” she says, “today is the day you didn’t win the lottery. You deserve a consolation prize for that.”

  “Why are you so sure I didn’t win?” I ask. “Because I didn’t hear you yell like you promised,” she says, and laughs. “Even if I screamed, you wouldn’t have heard. You’re half deaf,” I say, smiling back at her. “Half deaf and half dead,” Mom says with a nod as she puts the last slice of cake on the table for me. “But tell me the truth, sweetie, do you know anyone else in the whole wide world who can make a crumb cake as delicious as mine?”

  DAD WITH MASHED POTATOES

  DAD

  Stella, Ella, and I were almost ten years old the day Dad shape-shifted. Mom doesn’t like us to say “shape-shifted” and insists that we say “left,” but it’s not like we came home from school that day and found the house empty. Because there he was, waiting for us in his armchair, glowing in the full whiteness of his glorious rabbithood, and when we bent to pet him behind the ears, he didn’t try to run away, he just wrinkled his nose with happiness. Mom immediately said we couldn’t keep him because he took shits all over the house, and when Stella tried to break it to her gently that the rabbit was actually Dad, Mom got angry and told her to stop because it was hard enough as it was, and then she started to cry.

  Ella and I gave Mom some jasmine tea and almond cookies, because jasmine calms you down and almonds cheer you up, and that afternoon, Mom definitely looked like she needed some cheering up and calming down. After she thanked us and drank her tea, Mom kissed all three of us and said that the night before, when we were asleep, she and Dad had fought, but in whispers so as not to wake us, and afterward, Dad threw a few things in his white backpack and left the house. Mom said that from now on, we were going to have a tough time, so we all had to be strong and help one another, and when she finished talking, there was a long, unpleasant silence. Finally Dad signaled me with his nose to go over and hug her, and when I did, she started to cry again. Ella, frightened by the crying, whispered to me, “But why is she crying? The main thing is that he came back.” But Mom’s tears kept coming, and the crying turned into angry sobbing. Stella tried to change the subject, saying that maybe the four of us should do something nice together today, like bake a carrot cake, but that just made Mom more upset. “I want that rabbit out of the house today,” she said, “do you hear me?” and went to her room to rest.

  When Mom woke up from her afternoon nap, we brought her a glass of lemonade we made ourselves, a slice of bread with butter and jam, and one of her migraine pills, because whenever she wakes up, her head hurts. But first we locked Dad in our room, because Stella
said that the faces he made when we spoke drove Mom crazy and it would be much easier to persuade her to let him stay if he wasn’t around. She also explained to Ella that when we spoke to Mom about him, we shouldn’t call him Dad, because Mom was still mad at him, and until she forgave him completely, we needed to pretend that Dad was just a rabbit.

  Mom ate the bread, took the pill, drank all the lemonade, then kissed each one of us on the forehead and said she loved us and now that the four of us were alone in the world, we were her only consolation. Ella told her that we weren’t alone, that we had a rabbit, and just as we were her consolation, the rabbit was ours, because even if he couldn’t do anything, not even boil water for tea or open a jar of jam, he could still rub against our legs, run around us, and let us pet his soft fur whenever we wanted. Mom said we were kind and generous girls, two excellent traits that would help us a lot in life, but the rabbit still had to go. Then she put on her shoes, took the car keys off the shelf near the door, and said she was going into town to get the man from the pet store to help us; and after he trapped Dad, he’d sell him to a family with a big house and yard who would take care of him better than we could. “No family could take care of him better than us,” cried Ella, who had always been afraid of the strange man from the pet store. “He’ll be sad without us, and we’ll be sad without him.” But Mom nodded without even listening and said we could watch TV until she came back.

  The minute Mom left, Ella and I told Stella that we had to hurry and hide Dad in a place where Mom and the man from the pet store would never find him; but Stella insisted that it would never work because Mom really knew how to look for things and always found them, even when they were really, really lost. “But he’s our father,” Ella cried, “we can’t let them take him away from us.”