Breakfast With Buddha Read Online Free PDF Page B

complaint.
    When I heard the latch click I said, “Are you . . . is he . . . are you sleeping together?”
    “Otto!”

    “Is he trying to con you?”
    “Con me? You are so off base that—”
    “Mom and Pop’s property, our property now, is two thousand acres of prime North Dakota wheat land. Do you have any idea what that is worth?”
    She shook her head.
    “Five hundred dollars an acre.”
    She reached up and put the fingers of her left hand to her throat, a gesture straight out of her earliest years. “You’re kidding. A million dollars! Our little farm in the middle of nowhere?”
    “Plus the house.”
    “I had no idea.”
    “Plus the mineral rights, which we’ll retain, just in case. Still want to give it away?”
    “Of course. Even more so. If you take, I don’t know, say, fifteen hundred acres and leave Rinpoche five hundred plus the house, that would be fair, wouldn’t it?”
    “To whom?”
    “To you. You have children getting ready to go to college. That’s $750,000 for you! That would be enough, wouldn’t it? Even after the taxes and the commission and everything?”
    This stopped me, I have to say. She was squeezing my arm excitedly, and I felt a quick rainshower of shame on my face. “Seese,” I said, “I make . . . I make a fair amount of money. Jeannie makes some, too, and she had a tidy inheritance when her mother passed on. You . . . you get by on what?”
    She waved this question away as if it didn’t matter any more than a cutworm in a row of carrots when, in fact, I knew that she had a sizeable mortgage on her ramshacklehome at the edges of a city where property values were not exactly soaring; that her rusty old car had 200,000 miles on it; and that she couldn’t remember the last vacation she’d had. Everything that spells success in our society, all the little ego props that get you through a bad patch—job title, authority, important phone calls, expensive clothes or house, even just an office with a computer—and all the extra pleasures like a membership at the tennis club or a meal at the Zen Garden once a week, all this was missing from Cecelia’s life. She didn’t even drink wine, for heaven’s sake!
    Her face was positively glowing. “Rinpoche has been searching, over a year now, for a quiet, pretty place where he can have a retreat center—he has four of them in Europe, you know—but he needs space, and some way for it to be at least partly self-sustaining. This is perfect! It’s Mom and Pop’s gift to him through me!”
    Gift, all right, I thought. I said, “How long have you known Rinpoche?”
    She was beaming. “Many, many lives!”
    I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese’s back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow.
    I looked into Cecelia’s pretty eyes, then away. At this point I felt like I was tiptoeing along the edge of a Badlands cliff. One wrong step and over I would go. When you have known someone your whole life you don’t need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging.

    I felt, at that moment, a scream of sibling frustration rise up in my throat, a tirade. Your whole life, the tirade would have begun, one guy after the next has done this to you! This is your last chance for some security—how many more six-figure inheritances do you expect to receive? And you want to GIVE IT AWAY TO SOME RINPOCHE GUY! WITH FOUR CENTERS IN EUROPE! LET HIM GIVE SOMETHING TO YOU!
    But—and this was a first, the kindness in Cecelia’s voice took most of the angry impulse out of me—I managed only: “This might be your last chance for some security, you know.”
    She tilted her head and looked at me and it