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“Everyone is lonely.”

“Not lonely.”

“Lonely.”

“Someone’s coming.”

I looked out the front windows and the corncob doll was right. Over the rise of the hill by the orchard came three shapes. They walked down past the farm stand and up the path. The tall one had shoulder-length hair and tan skin and was smiling down at Mama. Clara clung to Mama’s hand, stumbling along as Mama looked up at the man with a smile. It was rare to see her smile like that, but I didn’t like it.

Shiva turned out to be the head gardener from a Hindu retreat in Connecticut that Mama called the Snatch-a-Banana ashram. He had a heft to his body and a look around the eyes as if he’d been crying, but he hadn’t. Mama had met Shiva through our old apprentice Michael, who said Shiva had been a brilliant gardener at the ashram and could help us with our garden. Mama still cried a lot in big wet bouts that left her nose red and swollen, but now Shiva would come up behind her in the kitchen, turn her to him, and kiss her. She leaned into him, but something in her was also pulling away.

“Kiss, kiss. Kiss, kiss,” I said, from across the room. Being in the room around two kissing people made me feel out of place in my own home. It was like the long-ago time I saw the naked couple out in the water of Secret Cove, the bare, entwined bodies caught in the beam of the flashlight.

When they weren’t kissing, Mama and Shiva spent hours on the floor in headstands and meditation.

“Mama,” Clara and I would plead. “We’re hungry.”

“In a minute,” she’d say. The minutes stretched on and on.

When Shiva was out working in the garden, I would try to make Mama laugh, like at Stan’s, but she would say she had to meditate, which meant sitting cross-legged on her hard round cushion, a zafu, she called it, with a mat called a zabuton under her feet. I imagine her sitting there on the cushion, trying to make peace in her heart, but her mind fought her every step of the way. As wonderful a tool as meditation can be, if you don’t have the right instruction, the right teachers, it simply becomes a means for the mind to attack itself. I know that madness is inside us all, but we each decide whether to make it comfortable, to give it a chair to sit in. Her meditation cushion became that chair.

As she sat on her zafu, her mind kept coming back to that day in July, circling it like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. It had rained the night before and the air was humid, as if waiting to rain again, but it was too hot for rain. The heat rose up at sunrise in visible waves, filling the bowl of the farm. The rain made the pond dark and deeper, but it was so hot the rain was forgotten. The cicadas fitz-fizzed. The birds were silent.

Skates was coming that day. Papa and Bess ate breakfast together. She knew her marriage was over, had been for a while now, though she kept holding on. There was so much she needed to hide from herself, and now from Skates. We kids were restless. The house needed cleaning, lunch needed cooking, Clara wanted nursing. The little fires went off in her mind, a scream, a need, someone’s disaster, something important forgotten, she’d run out of butter, no, you can never run out of butter, Eliot will be mad if there is no butter. And then her mind scrambled, trying to figure out how to get some butter as the pot of oatmeal frothed over onto the stove. She swung to catch it, hit her funny bone, swore as the oatmeal became a volcano, but no matter, there was no butter anyway. Someone was screaming now, she ran toward the sound, the girls fighting over a toy. Heidi took it, Lissie wants it back. “Work it out!” she yelled. Her face became a mask of her mother. She was her mother, she was herself, and she was the person her daughters would become.

“Out!” Mama screamed at us on that humid July morning, pointing at the door, the sweat shining on her forehead from the heat of the wood cookstove.

“You kids get outside. Now!”

Years later, Mama’s shrink would tell her it started when she was a child. A need not met by her parents that made it hard