Free Breakfast With Buddha by Roland Merullo

upstairs to see where you are, then out into the garage, then into the bushes near the stream.”
    “Give him some of my old T-shirts to sniff.”
    “Can’t. I’m sniffing them.”
    “You’re all right?”
    “Fine. I’m a little concerned about this idea of Seese’s. That’s a hefty sum to be giving away.”

    “I told her the same thing. We’ll see. Maybe something will change. There was a bad accident on the interstate. Two cars and a truck. Someone died, I think. The length of Seese’s farewell hug might have saved my foolish ass.”
    “You have a nice ass, actually.”
    “We were held up forty minutes. Anyway, I had one of my little fits.”
    “In front of the guru?”
    “Yeah. He handled it well. He’s been in jail, in Russia.”
    “My God, Otto, it sounds like you should be keeping notes.”
    “Seese wanted me to show him America. This quadrant of America, at least.”
    “The kids miss you already. They’d never say it, but I can tell because they’re not fighting. Want me to call them to the phone?”
    “Don’t bother them now. I’ve decided to write them. An actual letter. The old-fashioned way. Prepare them, would you?”
    “They’ll be shocked. They won’t know how to open it. They won’t know what it is. They miss you. I miss you.”
    “I’ll sneak into bed with you as you dream.”
    “I wish.”
    We said our good-byes and I hung up and stretched a little more, musing on the notion that I had, by pure chance, found a woman like Jeannie. Or was it chance, after all? Seese had referred to it once as an “arranged marriage” in keeping with her idea that all relationships are part of the general plan, people brought to the same bed by the Supreme Intelligence who runs the universe. Arranged or not, part of the plan or not, after a few years of mutual adjustmentit had worked out remarkably well. Jeannie and I had known nothing of life when we met and starting dating. We had been tremendously different in background, temperament, even hair color. I was a farm kid, she was a Connecticut sophisticate who chose grad school in Dakota to get away from an abusive mother and to pursue a short-lived interest in soil chemistry. Somehow, our physical infatuation and intellectual kinship had evolved into real love, her strengths filling in for my weaknesses, and possibly vice versa. We had our tiffs and bad moments, of course, but I rarely forgot to be grateful for her.
    I stretched a bit more—the human vertebral column was not designed for office work, or for hours in the car—then washed up, put on my sport coat, and went downstairs for dinner.
    In the 250-year-old dining room I was given a table looking out on a courtyard where a fountain splashed and bubbled and where a ten-foot-tall wooden sculpture stood, looking out of place. General Sutter himself, I imagined. At the check-in desk there had been a brochure giving the general’s story—he had, apparently, “discovered” California, or some such thing—but I have to admit that, with a few exceptions, I am strangely uninterested in American history. All slaughter and deprivation, all courage and will, it left me cold, though I like old houses and places where you can see the mark of the past. I told this to my sister once and she said it was because I’d had no other lifetimes on this continent.
    As I was musing on the idea of past lives (I’d heard once, perhaps from her, that reincarnation had been part and parcel of Christian doctrine until the sixth or seventh centuryafter Christ’s death, at which point some potentate in the Church had decreed it heretical), the waitress set before me a menu I can only describe as astounding. Here we were, deep in the green heart of Pennsylvania, and they were offering elk, buffalo, and seafood coquille. The wine list was just as complete, and after the waitperson (Aliana was her name, studying philosophy and the history of religion at Penn State) had stopped by three times to inquire, I at