“My dad’s into Buddhism,” I said. When that didn’t seem like enough, I said: “And I don’t get along with my mother.” I don’t know why I didn’t simply tell her that my father had abandoned me without a word, or that I had—let’s admit it—run away from my mother’s house, if you can really call it running away when you leave plain tracks and credit card receipts and no one bothers to come after you. Janet would have understood perfectly, I know that now, but at the time it all seemed raw and terrible, a wound too new to let breathe.

“What about Laurel?” I asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

It wasn’t, or not to me, but I nodded anyway.

Janet was from New York City, a place I could only imagine as an endless series of sharp edges and hard surfaces. Her mother had left her father when she was six, and now lived in Cincinnati with an accountant and a set of twins, half siblings Janet had never met. Her father worked long hours, and she had more or less raised her two younger brothers in their small Brooklyn apartment.

When I told her that my parents were divorced too, she shrugged. “It’s very popular,” she said, but after that I thought her movements were a little looser around me.

Janet couldn’t afford the price of the program. It was an aunt who financed her stays at the Center every summer, she said, a mostly estranged sister of her mother’s with herds of cats, an addiction to incense, and a hefty inheritance (courtesy of not one but two suspiciously deceased husbands), who had visited her family’s apartment in the city once and had sent her a registration notice and a plane ticket that summer and every summer since. But she’d never visited again, and when Janet called one night to ask if she could come live with her, her aunt pretended she didn’t know who was calling. Janet did a very funny impression of this. She was almost able to keep the bitterness out of it.