“Mom’s under a lot of pressure right now to hit all the orange pegs, so I’d appreciate it if  we conducted the interview in the backyard where it’s quiet,” says Brandon Duncans, age 13.

This is my first time meeting the Duncans, a family not unlike most. Their house is a beige paneled ranch in the suburbs. Their dog is a Labrador adopted from the pound. And their mother is addicted to Peggle.

“You could say we’re the post-nuclear family,” quips Brandon over afternoon cocktails. The sun is hot, even under the back patio’s umbrella canopy, but the drink’s refreshing mix of ginger ale and grenadine provides temporary relief.

“Before I mix my elixirs, I give each cup a teaspoon of mashed maraschinos,” Brandon says. He’s a precocious stand-in for an absent parent.  “My mother taught me that trick. I do so miss her.”

The sugar high opens Brandon up to discussing the elephant in the computer room: a lonely woman taking on the existential quandaries of midlife along with 4 orange pegs and one final ball.

She’s been mostly at the computer for seven months. On those rare occasion she gets out – to use the restroom or visit her parents – she brings her iPhone with its one app, Peggle. Her index fingers – now little more than skin sheeted bones – tap and click at the glass, the noise interrupted every so often by a scratchy recording of “Ode to Joy,” the triumphant tune played each time a Peggle board’s completed.

But, to the Duncans, the victory song sounds like a melodic strain of defeat. Ode to Joy is embedded with painful memories: Mom missing Brandon’s junior high graduation, Mom missing Brandon’s confirmation, Brandon missing Mom.

“She’ll snap back to reality,” says Leonard Duncan, Brandon’s father. “She was just like this with Tetris in the late 90s. Wouldn’t go to work. Wouldn’t pay bills. Wouldn’t have sex. And all that did was make our marriage loveless. Then Brandon was born.”