Breakfast With Buddha Read Online Free PDF

nodded and smiled a great deal but said nothing. Cecelia asked about Anthony, Natasha, and Jeannie with so much genuine affection in her voice that I forgave her three-quarters of her oddities in the time it took to chew and swallow a bite of bread.
    “They wanted to come,” I told her. “The kids wanted to see their Aunt Seese. For a minute there I thought I could convince them to just load up the minivan and all of us make the trip together.”
    As she listened to this small lie, a flicker of something not-so-good touched Cecelia’s features. It was quick as a hummingbird kiss, just a momentary dimming of the smile, but of course I noticed. We were, after all, brother and sister. I had noticed, too, walking from back door to kitchen, that she did not have any suitcases stacked up on a chair, ready to go into the trunk of my car. They could be in thebedroom, I told myself, but, as we finished the meal, as Cecelia turned her back and took our empty salad bowls to the sink, I began to have a sense that an unwelcome surprise was floating in the air above the kitchen table.
    My own psychic abilities, heretofore undiscovered, were soon confirmed. Cecelia paused for a moment with her hands gripping the front edge of the sink, then turned and marched resolutely back to the table, maintaining eye contact with me the whole way. She sat down very deliberately. She said, “Otto, we have to have a conversation.”
    I said, “I noticed you haven’t packed.”
    She said, “I’m not going.”
    “Not going? Since when? You have to go.”
    “I don’t have to anything.”
    “Right. Good. I just took off two extra weeks from work, lost half my time at the Cape with my wife and kids, packed up, planned the whole trip, and why? Because you said you wanted to be there to ‘say good-bye to the land’ and because you are . . . uncomfortable . . . flying. And you wait until I get to your house to tell me you’re not going!”
    I could feel the Rinpoche next to me. In my peripheral vision he seemed to be smiling. I had an urge to punch him, and this was a big deal because I had not punched anyone since a fine day, twenty-two years earlier, when Michael Redgewick put a hand on Jeannie’s ass at a UND graduate-student dance to which I had brought her.
    “Something has changed,” my sister said mysteriously.
    “Right. Good. I appreciate it.”
    “Otto,” she reached out and put her hand on my arm. “I know you think I’m a nutcake. You’re nice, you try to hide it, but I know you think that.”
    “Nutcake is as nutcake does,” I said stupidly. It had beenone of Mom’s sayings when we were kids, and eventually turned into a family joke. “You couldn’t have called me, at least, before I left home?”
    “You wouldn’t have come.”
    “You’re damn right, I—”
    “You wouldn’t have met Rinpoche.”
    “I realize that. And I’m pleased to meet . . . does he speak English?”
    They both nodded.
    I turned to face the man. “I’m pleased to meet you, really. You seem like a very pleasant man, but,” I looked at my sister, “Cecelia, what means more to me than meeting Rinpoche, nice as he is, is—”
    “You never would have come. You never in a million years would have agreed to go to Dakota with Rinpoche.”
    “I’m not. I haven’t agreed. I’m not doing it.”
    “It’s important that you do, Otto.”
    “I won’t.”
    “I’m giving him my half of the land, and the house, too, if you’ll let me. Or you can take more of the land to make up for it. The land is worth some money, isn’t it?”
    I looked at her. I looked at Rinpoche. Every story I’d ever heard about softhearted single women preyed upon by con artists came honking around me like a gaggle of geese. I said, “Rinpoche, would you mind leaving us to fight in private for a few minutes?”
    Rinpoche smiled and nodded—a bit too vigorously, it seemed, almost as if he were somehow making fun of me, but he stood and went out the back door without