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My friend sighs, “I’m sorry, how is Attila doing?”

“He’s out at the track. Riding. Though all isn’t well.”

“Oh?”

“Someone tried to hurt him.”

“What?”

I relay the story of Attila’s near drowning.

“Ever since you first set foot on a racetrack you’ve been getting into very serious trouble.”

“Oh stop. It’s purely coincidental.”

“That Ariel psycho was not coincidental,” Jane says, referring to Ariel DiCello, a disturbed woman who, nine months ago, hired me to follow her boyfriend, a racetracker. It had all happened when I’d made up a little lie about being a private detective. A little lie that had ended up becoming a reality. It got me into a fair heap of trouble too.

“Okay, I admit I took the Ariel thing on voluntarily.”

“No one forced you to shack up with a jockey.”

“True. But I had no idea he was a jockey in trouble.”

“I’m sure you did. On some level.” She sighs, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you this past year. And what happened to Ed? I thought you were crazy about Ed.”

“I was crazy about Ed. Am. But he’s gone.”

“For good?”

“I have no way of knowing that.” I rein in my frustration. We’ve had this conversation several times before.

“How about asking?”

“No. It’s one of those things. I have to leave it be.”

There’s a pause as Jane mulls this over.

“Maybe it’s contributing.”

“To what?”

“To your cautionless behavior.”

“No, it’s the yoga.”

She snorts. It was at her insistence that I tried and then became addicted to yoga. My daily yoga practice has made me calmer, stronger, and less likely to smoke cigarettes, but it’s also made me strangely brave. Mastering mildly dangerous physical tricks like balancing upside down on my forearms while trying to bring my feet to touch the top of my head has made me less afraid of whatever’s waiting for me out there in the world. I now try convincing Jane that it’s this peculiar yoga-induced braveness that’s leading me into trouble. She snorts again.

I successfully change the subject by telling Jane my mother actually called me. Jane is as surprised as I was. She’s fascinated by what’s left of my family—my father died eleven years ago, and Jane thinks that my mother and sister and I are savages for failing to be close-knit. Jane spends a lot of time with her own mother and was very close to her father until he died. She’s mortified that I don’t go down to Pennsylvania to visit my mother at least once a week and has succeeded in getting me to call my mother more frequently. She had long claimed this would eventually make my mother call me for no reason. Now it’s finally happened. And Jane is triumphant. Eventually though, she brings the conversation back to Attila, asking me what I intend to do.

“I honestly don’t know. He won’t call the police and I’m not going to call them. I just can’t do that.”

“Please stay away from the racetrack,” Jane says.

“That I can’t promise. I won’t go tomorrow though. I have to go to work.”

“Good,” she says. She tries getting me to agree to come to a yoga class the following night but I demur.

“I might need to go to sleep early tomorrow night. I’ve had a draining few weeks with all this shacking up,” I tell her.

She snorts yet again.

“Where did you pick up this new habit of snorting?” I ask irritably.

“What snorting?”

“You keep snorting at me.”

“I do?” She sounds genuinely baffled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snort. That’s disgusting.”

We both laugh and then bid each other a good day before hanging up. But I’m not sure what’s good about it. In fact, I feel my mood taking a dive. I decide to put on some layers and get out of the house.

There are still enormous banks of snow flanking the streets and few cars are venturing onto Surf Avenue as I cross over and head toward the water.

The boardwalk is deserted and, just ahead, big waves are violently slamming the beach. I sit down on a bench, pull out a cigarette, and light it. I have only smoked one so far today and the nicotine goes right to my head, improving my mood considerably while presumably shortening