Breakfast With Buddha Read Free

the computer screen. Maybe Stacey was writing to say that Neal’s new hairstyle wasn’t as cute as his old one, or that Ilene’s choice in skirts that day had been off the wall. It was important to answer such things without delay.
    “Well, I thought it might be fun if we made a road trip out of it. The four of us. Jasper, too. We could try camping, or stay in nice hotels, or a combination. Swim, eat, see the big sights. A family adventure. What do you think?”
    She looked at me for what seemed the span of her childhood, then said: “Camping, Dad? With, like, my brother the disgusting beast?”
    “Okay, so minus the camping out of the equation. What do you think of the idea?”

    The look in her eyes was suddenly the look of a thirty-year-old. It is a law of the universe that your words come back to you—and in exactly the same tone of voice. “Dad,” she said, “be sensible.”
    I AM AN UPBEAT sort of person, in general. It’s a valuable temperament in the book publishing world, where there are eighteen failures for every success and where the tidal sweeps of fashion knock even the most sure-footed soul into the hard surf at least once or twice a year. It’s a valuable temperament in the rough waters of raising teenagers, too. And so, though I’d gotten exactly nowhere with Natasha, I stepped down the hall and knocked on Anthony’s door, thinking that, if I could convince him to come out in favor of the family road trip, then he and Jeannie and I could gradually work Tasha free of her resistance.
    That spring, Anthony was going through the ordeal known as puberty. His nose and ears were growing too fast for the rest of his face. His skin was breaking out. Dark hairs were showing themselves above his top lip. His sister, of course, never tired of reminding him of these troubles, and Jeannie and I were often having to act as referee. When I went into his room, I found him lying on his bed tossing a baseball into the air and catching it, over and over again, in a sullen hypnosis.
    “I remember doing that,” I said, sitting sideways on the bed and squeezing his lower leg once. Anthony was at the age where he did not particularly like to be touched. “Some nights I’d try to get to a thousand catches.”
    “On those boring North Dakota nights, huh, Dad?” He stopped tossing the ball and looked at me.

    “They could be pretty bad. But it’s a cool place in other ways. You’ve never seen the real countryside there. Wild buffalo. The Badlands. Native American stuff.”
    “Yeah?”
    “It’s like a different world,” I went on, encouraged. “Gram and Gramps liked it there.” I saw a familiar shadow come over his pimpled face; he and my father had been close. “Still sad about them, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I have to go out there, you know, to settle the estate, sell the house.”
    “When?”
    “August. I should drive, and August is the only time I can get away from work for that long. Want to go?”
    “Where?”
    “North Dakota?”
    “Driving?”
    “Sure. I thought we’d make a family adventure out of it. All of us.”
    “Nah.”
    “What about just me and you, then?”
    “Nah. I was thinking of going out for football. I was gonna ask if I could stay at Jonah’s house when you guys go to the Cape.”
    You’re 135 pounds, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I had been a 135-pound football player myself, seen a total of about fourteen minutes playing time, and had a lot of good memories from those days, and one shaky knee.
    “What if we made the trip before football?”
    “It starts August 3, Dad.”
    “All right. But in principle you’d like to go, right?”
    “Not that much, to tell you the truth. I’m into, like, myown private space these days. You know, all that time in the car together, motel rooms. Not my thing.”
    T HERE IS A PATIO at the back of our house. It’s the usual setup—outdoor furniture, potted plants. Standing or sitting there you can look down toward a stream that cuts