As if I’d done it on purpose.

“Why did you do it?” she asked.

“We are not getting into this again,” I said.

To my surprise, she didn’t argue with me. She sighed, her breath sending a rush of static over the international connection. “I blame myself. It’s all my fault. I should have been there for you, and I’m going to change things.”

She sounded so melodramatic, and yet I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of hope. I wanted to believe her.

“I know we don’t get along all the time, but we need to talk,” she said. “I’ll be in San Francisco on July twenty-fifth. Would you come and have lunch with me?”

She made it sound like I had a choice, but I could never have said no. “Okay,” I agreed.

“Good,” she said, sounding relieved. “I can’t wait to see you, darling. I’ll have Jeri email you with the details.” Jeri was her assistant who booked all her travel. I’d gotten a lot of emails from Jeri over the years. “I should go now. I need to get my beauty sleep. I’ll see you in San Francisco.”

Chapter 10

On Monday I accompanied Joan to Spirit Rock, a nearby Buddhist retreat center, for their weekly meditation night. She had been a regular for a while, but I’d never gone with her until now. She wore cloisonné earrings in the shape of flying birds, and they glowed turquoise and emerald green and pink in the golden evening light as we walked from the parking lot to the community hall. It looked like a giant double-wide trailer, and when we entered the meditation room, the floor creaked and swayed, as if it wasn’t quite fixed to the ground.

Joan seemed to know a lot of people, and she introduced me to some of them before the meditation began. They greeted her with hugs and smiles, asking about her art and whether she was going to teach another class. Most were middle-aged or older white women, and I was probably the youngest person in the room. I remember thinking that Joan was different here, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

The teacher, who sat cross-legged on a low platform in front of the altar, was a wiry, balding white man with a bushy gray mustache. About a dozen people sat on cushions on the floor facing the altar, but we sat in the uncomfortable folding chairs lined up in rows. I struggled to stay awake during the half-hour meditation session, but eventually a bell rang to indicate the end, and everyone shifted and stretched, making the plastic chairs squeak. And then the teacher began to speak.