That’s what Connie told him to do when he got angry: jump up and down, release it, move the energy in a different direction. Connie was super smart, which made it hard for Michael to accept her weird interests and beliefs. He didn’t understand where they came from until Poppy explained that Connie had lived in Nepal when she’d served in the Peace Corps. Poppy told him that Connie had a secret name that had been given to her by a shaman, and she’d witnessed the sacrifice of a black goat in a healing ceremony. She’d had to rub kerosene on the legs of her cot to keep the bedbugs from crawling into it. On her way back, she almost died when the landing gear on her small airplane from Kathmandu to the Delhi airport had failed. The wheels flopped up and down and wouldn’t lock in place. They flew back and forth over the tower for over an hour to lessen the fuel load before the emergency landing. “She’ll never fly again. She says Cape Cod is all the adventure she needs now,” Poppy said. “I wouldn’t let one bad experience in an airplane keep me from traveling. Someday, I’m going to go everywhere.” It was the one point on which mother and daughter differed, Michael noted. Otherwise they were two peas in a pod.

He saw now that her time in the Peace Corps had been formative for Connie, and it was why she believed that everything was about energy. She even wore a string with a crystal on it that hung from her neck. When Poppy and Ann fought over space in the backseat on the ride out, Connie told them they were making her crystal turn cloudy.

Poppy was alarmed, while Ann rolled her eyes and groaned.

“Come on, Michael,” Connie said. “You need to change your energy. Please. I’ll jump with you.”

Jump? He didn’t feel like jumping. That was the bullshit for crystal-wearing ex-hippie teachers. Connie jumped, and her giant breasts rose and collapsed with her. She started laughing, and before Michael could help it, he laughed a little, too, and his anger crashed like a wave.

Suddenly he was deeply sad. It was all too much. “I want to go back,” Michael said, afraid his voice would break and he’d start to cry.

Ed said, “Back where? Milwaukee?”

No, no. That wasn’t what Michael was thinking. He shook his head violently. Milwaukee? He’d be fine if he never went back there, not ever.

Michael was so pent-up he could hardly open his mouth to speak. “The house,” he said. “I want to go back to the house.”

Ann suddenly appeared next to him, followed by Poppy. They came to an abrupt stop, sweaty from the run. The sun glinted off their foreheads and cheeks.

Connie said, “Michael tells us he wants to go home.”