Hot & Heavy (Lightning 2)

We have exactly seventeen cents in our savings account and absolutely nothing in checking.

Bills are due, salaries have to be paid and—thanks to my mother—the yoga studio is dead broke.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

I pull up the transfer records, see that she moved the money from savings to checking two days ago. I’m still holding out hope, still praying for fraud as I click on the check that took out all one hundred and eighty-eight thousand dollars—check number 0078643—and see that yep, it really was her. She wrote a check for one hundred eighty-eight thousand two hundred fifty-four dollars two days ago to someone named Ram Arjan.

Guru Ram, I realize as nausea churns deep inside me. She wrote a check to her guru for every penny the studio has. Well, almost every penny. She did leave us with seventeen cents.

Anger supplants the nausea, or at least buries it for a while, as I make a run for my phone. It’s bad enough that she took off for India two months ago to find herself (for the fourth time in the last decade alone) and left me to run the studio alone while balancing all my other clients as well. Bad enough that she swore she’d only be gone a month and we are currently on week nine.

But to do this? To sabotage the business she swears she loves? The business I’ve worked so hard to make—and keep—solvent for her?

What am I supposed to tell all the yoga instructors who deserve to be paid? How am I going to order food and tea for the café? Pay the electric and water bills—or the mortgage?

Fury races through me. I’ve got the money in my personal accounts, accounts my mother doesn’t have access to for this precise reason, but damn it, that’s my nest egg. I’ve saved and scrimped for that nest egg, from the time I took my first job at fifteen, so that I’d never have to sleep in a car or homeless shelter again. Never have to play guitar on the street (because eight-year-olds playing for money get so much more attention than adults begging for it, according to my mother). Never have to couch surf from one of my mother’s friends’ apartments to the next.

The idea of giving that money to the studio now—to fix one more of the messes my mother so effortlessly creates—makes me insane. More than insane, really. I’m pretty sure I could fly to India under my own power—with nothing but my own rage to fuel me.

The phone rings and rings—of course it does. It’s three-thirty in the afternoon there, my mother is probably sleeping. Or meditating. Or hanging out in downward dog position for fun. Or dancing. Or helping her dear, sainted guru spend one hundred and eighty-eight thousand dollars.

I hang up and text her a message to call me IMMEDIATELY. Then I call back and leave a voice message that says the same thing. Then, for good measure, I call back a third time just to annoy the shit out of her, on the off chance that she’s actually carrying her phone.

Turns out third time’s the charm because she picks up the phone with a breathless, “Hi, baby. How are you?”

I tell myself to be calm, to be cool. That yelling at her never solves anything. And then I open my mouth and all but scream, “Why did you give all of the yoga studio’s money to your guru?”

“Oh, Sage. You won’t believe the plans Guru Ram has. He already opens his temple to people from all over the world for free, but with this new influx of money he’ll be able to serve so many more people!”

“What about the people we serve, Mom? How am I going to pay the studio’s bills this month? How am I going to pay our instructors?”

“People pay dues—”

“Not until the beginning of the month. We’ve got two salary cycles to get through before that happens.”

“Oh, Sage, you’ll think of something. You always do.”

“There’s nothing to think of in this situation, Mom. Either the money is there or it isn’t.”

She hums softly. It’s a sound I remember from my childhood, one that always preceded a particularly awful bout of hippie-dippie bullshit. “The universe will provide, darling. It always does. Just look at the wonderful lives we’ve led. No matter how bad things seem, they always end up working out in the end. The universe fixes everything.”

“No, Mom, the universe doesn’t fix anything. I do. I’m the one who fixes the messes you get into. Not the universe. Me.”

“And look how lucky I am that the universe gave me you.”

I shove a frustrated hand through my hair and grab on as I fight the urge to scream. Only the knowledge that it won’t do any good keeps me from losing it completely. Nothing ever does when my mother is in this mood.

So instead of letting out the primal scream building deep inside of me, I clench my teeth together and count backward from one hundred until I can trust myself to speak. “When are you coming home, Mom? Maybe we can set up a couple yoga in the park classes with you for next weekend. Lani Kauffmann always draws a huge crowd.” And always nets us several thousand dollars.

Despite her flightiness and insanity—or maybe because of them—my mom is something of a San Diego celebrity. Her reputation is what keeps the yoga studio so full, and it’s what helps us draw a crowd every time she hosts a class for the general public.

“Oh, Sage, my darling flower. I can’t leave now. I’m on the edge of a breakthrough.”

Of course she is. “Is that what Guru Ram told you?”

“It is.” She sounds so excited I can practically see her bouncing up and down on her toes from here. “He says I’m very close to achieving a new spiritual plane.”

“Did you tell him it doesn’t matter how many more spiritual planes you achieve, you’re still broke?”