Here we go again. Just when I thought one good parent was better than two lousy ones I end up with no parents. What kind of family arithmetic is that? But what else could I do? I had to take care of Carter Junior. He was my brother and now I was the man of the house—my house. And as Special Ed said to me, “When you have bad thoughts just give your head a good shake and throw ’em out so you can make room for the pawzzz-i-tive thoughts.” When I woke up the next morning I decided that’s exactly what I was going to do with the house. I was going to shake it up, and clean it out, and raise Carter Junior in a house that was fit for a little Pigza prince, and not just a racetrack for roaches!

I figured I’d start from the top down—and that meant getting into my mom’s closet. I ran down to the kitchen and grabbed the roll of trash bags and ran back up before Carter Junior could break through the wall of pillows I’d made and flop off Mom’s bed. He was always slipping over the edge headfirst like he was going over Niagara Falls.

When I got back upstairs he was fussing so I had to take a time-out and give him some milk and change his diaper. And then I let him play on the floor in a heap of Mom’s old clothes while I got busy.

As it turned out, Mom’s closet was like a secret bank vault. Once I started going through all her pockets I started finding change and dollar bills and food stamps, and every time I found something good I’d yell out “Cha-ching!” and shove it into my pocket, and then if it looked roachy I’d throw the old dress or blouse or pants or pair of shoes into the trash bag.

About ten bags later I finished the closet and dragged the trash across the floor and heaved the bags out her bedroom window and down onto our front yard, which looked like our own Pigza pigpen. Nothing grew there. It was all scratchy brown weeds and hard-packed dirt decorated with orange and white cigarette butts, pancaked beer cans, loser lottery tickets, and flimsy plastic store bags that danced a ghostly litterbug jig each time the breeze kicked up a dance tune.

After all the busywork I got Carter Junior up and dressed and we went down to the grocery store to spend our newfound money. I got two bags of mostly baby food. I got one bag of cleaning supplies and one with nothing but peanut butter and crackers because I knew I could live on that forever. And when we checked out I tripled the plastic bags just for Carter Junior so I could haul him around by the handles like he was a big old fish flopping around in there. I put him in the shopping cart with the other bags and then I made a little train by shoving two more carts onto the front. We made a crazy racket as I pushed out of the parking lot and we went road-racing down the street while steering wildly left then right around the deep holes where they were fixing the gas pipes. Carter Junior liked the wild ride but kept rolling out of his bag and climbing up the side of the cart to lift himself over the edge. He wasn’t in danger because the tops of the other carts kept him caged in, and since I was the man of the house I had to spell out the rules of the road to him. “Rule number one,” I said, raising my finger in the air as we rattled down a hill. “From now on no Pigza shall harm him- or herself!”

I think that rule calmed him down, and he was a lot happier when we got home and I let him out of his bag. We had a good hug and then Pablo and Pablita lick-kissed him about a hundred times and I changed his diaper again and washed his hands and face and gave him a bottle. I put him on the couch to watch Spanish soaps on TV. Someday he’ll be bilingual, but for now I really wanted him to learn how to make those huge Spanish facial expressions so his face would tell me exactly what he was feeling.

So, while he became bi-facial, I roach-proofed the kitchen cabinets. I didn’t want to use any bug spray because of the baby and the dogs so I just set out the Roach Motels I’d bought, which were creepy because I started imagining what it would be like to spend a deadly night in one. I wish my special gift didn’t make me sensitive to the family lives of roaches because, really, I had to kill them.

While I was cleaning the cabinets I got some more trash bags and started throwing out all the old food that had been half eaten by us and rejected by the fussy roaches. We had a lot of dented cans of soup and chili and tuna that we got for free because when no one was looking Mom would drop the can on the store floor and step on it with her boot and crush in the side. Then she’d ask the lonely-looking manager with the label gun on his sagging plastic belt if we could have it for free, or half price. Usually we got it for free because Mom dressed up special to go food shopping and put on lipstick and perfume and a fluffy pink sweater. Her rule for me in the store was to stay with Carter Junior in a different aisle and act like we didn’t know her—until later when I had to carry home a lot of dented cans and crushed boxes of cereal and expired cottage cheese. I didn’t like it when Mom said that for us “America should be the land of the free everything because we were part of the land of dented lives.” I guess that’s why we also had a lot of coffee-shop sugar packets, and stacks of paper napkins, and coffee stirrers, and powdered creamer and pats of butter, and toothpicks, and disposable chopsticks, and plastic utensils, and Styrofoam plates, and straws, and a whole drawer full of ketchup packets and mustards and mayonnaise and hot sauce and half rolls of toilet paper she got at the public library. If it was free, we had it. “Even kids are free,” she had announced.

And even running away from your kids is free, I thought. Even losing your mind is free. Getting sick is free. Being alone is free. Being poor is free. Being afraid is free. Being ignored is free. Having crummy parents is free. I had to stop thinking that way because even torturing myself with sad thoughts was free.

So I kept busy, which is always the best free medicine for me. After checking on the baby, who was sound asleep with both dogs curled up next to him like a pair of furry bedroom slippers, I threw out all the old dented food and free junk and I put our new food in a clean kitchen cabinet and got some tape and sealed the edges of the cabinet door so the roaches couldn’t sneak in. That made me feel better.

Then I opened another cabinet door and taped a piece of paper to the inside of it and drew a week calendar with seven squares. In square number one I wrote, Mom left. In square number two I wrote, cleaned house. Then I looked at the last square. “O ancient Greek Oracle,” I whispered quietly, in case she was asleep. “Do I dare write Mom returns?”

I closed my eyes and waited for an answer. And then I heard Mom’s voice saying, “Inner strength. Self-love. You have it. I want it.”

“Thank you, Oracle,” I said, and raised my eyes toward the shiny spot on the ceiling over the stove, because there was a lot of ancient grease up there.

I drew two little humans and two little dogs under the calendar. “O Oracle,” I said while I had her attention, “if Mom asks, tell her we’ll be here for her no matter what day it is.”

After I did that I felt a lot more hopeful and remembered some good advice Mom gave me. She said the best way to find anything that was lost was to just act like the person who lost it in the first place. Since she was so spacey when she lost my meds, I took a break from kitchen work and ran around the house in circles until I got falling down dizzy and spacey and then I started looking for my meds. I opened the hall coat closet and went through those pockets and found a handful of change, and then I spun around again until I was good and wobbly and cracked my nose on the edge of the door as I lurched sideways into the bathroom. I opened the medicine chest. There was some old tooth powder and a rusty single-edged razor blade and toenail clippers. But no meds. I gave it one more chance. I spun around and even moaned, “O Oracle, please tell me where my meds are hidden.” I got an idea and went upstairs into the empty bedroom across the hall from hers. There were some boxes of Christmas decorations stored in the closet. I clawed through a few cases of lights and crushed ornaments but found no meds. What totally spacey planet could she have been on when she hid them? I thought.

Then I heard something clatter loudly and go thump from down below. “Carter Junior,” I hollered, “hang on!”

I turned and pounded down the stairs. The front door was still locked but Carter Junior wasn’t in the living room. He wasn’t in the kitchen. I dashed into my bedroom, which was across from the kitchen, just as a baseball slowly rolled along the floor. He was in the back of my closet playing with my old baseball stuff from when I belonged to a Little League team. “Carter Junior,” I called out, and poked my head under my hanging clothes. “Hey, buddy, let me teach you how to pitch because I was the best there ever was—until I lost my control and smashed car windows in the parking lot.”

I hoisted him up with my right hand and jammed my left hand into my baseball glove—but something creepy was already in there. For a shocking moment I remembered Chuck Darts at school and that I had told him a black widow spider was in his baseball glove. What I didn’t realize at school was that the prediction wasn’t for Chuck, it was for me, and as I wiggled my fingers deeper into the glove I felt the spider bite me. I yelped out loud and flung the glove across the room. Carter Junior saw the bug-eyed fear on my face. He yelped out loud and began to wrestle out of my grip.

When I looked down to see if the spider was coming after us for another bite I saw a bunch of my med patches on the floor and scattered across the room. Ha! There was no spider! Mom had stuffed my med patches into my old baseball glove! I looked at the tip of my finger and the spider bite was only a paper cut. I began to laugh, and laughed like a maniac because it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to me. The Oracle had worked! It told me exactly where Mom hid my meds.

Then something even funnier happened. I plopped Carter Junior down on my bed and as I held my stomach and belly laughed he held his stomach and belly laughed. Then when I hopped around, he rolled around. I slapped my thigh, and he slapped his thigh. And when I yelled with joy, he yelled with joy. Everything I did, he did. He was a little me. He had become bi-facial from watching soap operas—or maybe I was his own personal soap opera. He couldn’t tell me what he was thinking but he could imitate me perfectly. I sat down on the bed and hugged him and began to laugh. “I love you, Carter Junior,” I said. “You are my Oracle helper!” Then I poked him in the chest and smiled my huge carved-pumpkin smile.

Then he reached out and touched me in the chest and smiled his little carved-pumpkin smile.

It was so great having my own baby brother mirror. And then it was so terrifying because I had to save him from everything. I picked up a patch and started to rip open the waxy cover with my teeth and he picked up a patch and put it in his mouth.

I tugged it away from him, and as I quickly gathered up all the rest of my meds I realized why Mom hid them. She knew he’d want to be like me. She hadn’t lost her entire mind. She was still protecting him.

“Thank you, Mom,” I whispered. “I know you love us. Get better soon.” Then I turned my back on Carter Junior as I quickly changed my patch. “Come on,” I said to the little copycat, and swooped him up and went into the living room. “We have to get that trash out of the front yard. Help me load up the carts and we’ll make a trash train and push this old junk over to Goodwill, and then we have a million other things to do.”

I loved feeling pawzzz-i-tive.