“Dirty Birdy,” I said, keeping an eye out for broken glass and dog excrement. “They were Cöld Söre for a while. With umlauts.”

“But of course,” Darren said.

“But then the bass player left, and they reformed, and now they’re Dirty Birdy.” The band was third on the bill, not scheduled to go on until midnight, which, realistically, could mean much later than that. Darren, who still seemed to be laboring under the misapprehension that this was a date, took my arm as we navigated past a puddle of what looked like vomit. It was nice having him with me, sort of like having our old golden retriever, Mittens, loping along at my side.

I looked at the doorways, then down at my iPhone. “It should be right here. The club-slash-coffee-shop is called Drip, and I checked the address before leaving my apartment.” But there was no sign on the plain red door, no number, nothing to indicate that there was a business behind it.

Darren looked at my screen, then looked at the door. Then he knocked. The door swung open. Smoke and loud voices poured out into the street, and a muscled bouncer held out one tattooed mitt. “Ten dollars,” he said.

Darren peeled off a twenty. “You need a sign,” I told the bouncer, who looked at me like he didn’t understand English. “Seriously,” I said, twisting through the crush of bodies, pulling my earplugs out of my pocket and hoping against hope that there’d be something as pedestrian as a table in the place. Fat chance. There were no tables in sight, just a bar that ran the length of the room, a couch upholstered in hideous paisley sagging against one wall, and a makeshift stage up front.

“What can I get you?” Darren asked.

“Whatever,” I said, trying not to sulk, or yawn. The room was hot and crowded, crammed with people who all seemed to be having more fun than I’d ever had in my life. Girls with glitter on their faces and tattoos on the smalls of their backs swigged from cans of Pabst and Coors, waving their arms in the air and swinging their hips as they spun around in tiny circles.

“Beer?” he asked. “Wine? Sloe gin fizz?”

“Vodka and tonic,” I said. It had been my parents’ summertime drink. In the Hamptons, they’d carried thermoses of V and Ts to the beach. I was ready for the worst, but the drink came in a clean glass, frosty on the outside, with a thick wedge of lime balanced on the rim. I took a sip, watching the girls dancing, trying to decide if they were high.

“Not bad,” Darren said, as Dirty Birdy finally took the stage and launched into their cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” “Is that your brother? He’s really good!”

I nodded, wondering if Darren actually enjoyed this noise, if anyone could. Tommy had a nice voice — he’d sung in choir in school — but all of his sweetness was drowned out by the volume of the pounding drums and the squealing guitars.

Forty minutes later, Tommy bounded off the stage, sweaty and smelling of beer and cigarette smoke. I introduced them, and my brother and Darren exchanged “hey, mans” and handshakes. Then I asked Darren to excuse us and walked Tommy to the bar, where I pulled Kate Klein’s folder out of my purse. “It’s about India,” I hollered into my brother’s ear. Tommy looked inside the folder for a minute, then looked over at the blonde in a ridiculously tiny T-shirt making eyes at him from the corner. After a minute, he sighed and pushed his beer at me. I pushed it right back.

“You know what, Betts?” His voice was raspy after shouting into the microphone. “This is none of our business.”

I drew back as if he’d slapped me. “Of course it’s our business! He’s being used. This woman is taking advantage of him.” My voice trailed off. Tommy patted my shoulder the way he would a puppy’s head. “Let it go,” he whispered in my ear. Then he lifted his head. “Hey, you and Derek want to hang out?”

I glared at him. “His name is Darren. And it is two o’clock in the morning, so no, we do not want to hang out.” He shrugged. I watched him go, standing like I was frozen on the sticky floor of the bar in Hoboken — Hoboken! I’d gone all the way to Hoboken! — before pushing the folder into my bag and stomping out the door in the jeans I’d bought for the occasion. Not that they made any difference. Even my jeans were wrong — too loose, too new, too dark, the wrong cut, the wrong brand, the wrong something.

“Hey, you okay?” Darren asked, following me into the darkness, toward the train that would take us back to the city. I could feel sweat gluing my blouse to the small of my back, where I would never have a tattoo. “Not great,” I’d said.

“Can I help?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Thank you for coming,” I said. We rode home in silence. He escorted me up the subway stairs, bought me a bottle of water at the Korean grocery store on my corner, and walked me to my door.

“If you want to talk about it. .” He looked sweet and hopeful, even cute, if you could ignore the glasses, but all I wanted was to be alone.

“I don’t,” I said. He handed me the water. Then he set his hands on my shoulders. Surprised, I stumbled backward, catching my heel on the curb. I would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding me. . but, of course, if he hadn’t been holding me I wouldn’t have tripped in the first place. Then, just like that, his lips were on mine, warm and gentle, and he’d pulled my body against his so that we were chest to chest, hip to hip. In that instant, I wasn’t hot, wasn’t tired, wasn’t irritated at the way the night had gone or worried about how exhausted I’d be the next day. I wanted to keep kissing him, to have him keep kissing me, even though I’d never approved of couples who kissed on the street. Then, as suddenly as he’d started, he stopped, releasing my shoulders, stepping back onto the sidewalk. “Betsy,” he said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Tina?”

“Family only.”

“Betts?”

“Only if I get to call you Dare.”

He grinned, tipped an imaginary hat, and set off in the direction of the subway, hands in his pockets, whistling.

Upstairs, I got out of my clothes and into the shower and stood there, letting the cool water wash over me. It was almost three in the morning, and I’d met with nothing but frustration as I’d tried to make my family see the absurdity of what my father and India were attempting… but still I fell asleep with a smile.

The following weekend I went to the one person I thought would see the gravity of the situation; I made my first trip ever to my mother’s ashram. I booked a ticket to New Mexico and flew out from LaGuardia on Saturday morning. I rented a car at the airport and followed the GPS’s directions through forty-five miles of blasted-looking desert interrupted by gas stations, the occasional casino, and clusters of Native Americans selling blankets by the side of the road.

The Baba had done well for himself. The parking lot was paved, the grounds of the Enlightenment Center beautifully landscaped, oases of jewel-green grass accented with fountains and manicured beds of flowers. I sat for forty-five minutes on a stone bench in the cool, tiled lobby of a little adobe building that I refused to call a yurt, listening to the tinkling of water into a basin, sipping tea that tasted like boiled twigs, and glaring at a young woman in a white linen caftan who answered the telephone in an annoyingly mellifluous voice. “Love, light, fulfillment,” she would singsong. When I pulled out my iPhone she used the same dopey voice to say that electronic devices were not permitted (“They disrupt your aura”).

Eventually, my mother glided in, dressed in white robes of rough linen, her familiar musky, sandalwood-and-patchouli scent filling the air. I felt my eyes burning, and I looked away, blinking, not wanting to let her see how much I still missed her, how jealous I was of the people who had their mothers there to help them through their twenties. A mother could help you choose and furnish your first apartment; she could listen to however much you chose to tell her about your love life; she could offer a loan or a sympathetic ear or even just a night when you could go back to the place you’d grown up in, sit in the kitchen while she made your favorite meal, and be a child again. All of that had been denied me, thanks to her selfishness, and to the Baba.

I clamped down on my fury as she led me to an empty yoga studio and handed me a buckwheat-filled bolster to perch on, explaining, as she arranged her own body, the importance of opening our hips. I sat cross-legged, awkward in my skirt and heels and sleeveless silk blouse (I’d taken off my jacket and left it in the car). My mother laid a woven Indian blanket over my lap, then looked me over with a tolerant and utterly infuriating smile.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s just that we don’t see many women dressed like you are.”

I looked down at my clothing, my Ferragamo pumps, and didn’t answer, thinking that she used to dress this way, too, that I was just as she’d made me, which gave her no right to judge.

My mother took my hands in hers. “What’s troubling you?” Her voice, once a combination of broad midwestern and New York City lockjaw, had become as syrupy and singsongy as the girl’s behind the counter had been. Her silvery-gray hair, which she’d been wearing in ridiculous Pocahontas braids before she’d left, was clipped short now, almost a buzz cut that exposed the oval shape of her skull and her elfin ears. Her pale-blue eyes looked enormous in her face. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and her skin was freckled and rosy from the sun. There were no earrings in her ears, no rings on her fingers, not a single bracelet or bangle, and she was barefoot underneath her robe, her toenails unpainted, her small feet calloused and tanned.

“Dad was in the hospital. He had a blocked artery. They gave him a stent.”

She sighed. “He has so much stress in his life. He needs to slow down.”

Whatever. “His new wife. . I found out some things about her. Some bad things.”

She nodded again. At least she was looking at me and not at her guru, whose framed portrait beamed down from the front of the room. The Baba had grown his long hair even longer, and was sitting cross-legged, a beatific smile on his face, like a white Jimi Hendrix in a bathrobe.

“They want to have a baby.”

This, finally, got her attention. She cocked her head at a quizzical angle, eyes narrowed, jaw tight. I remembered that expression from when I’d come home to tell her that another girl had stolen my bookbag at lunch, and from the time she’d been ousted as head of the annual diabetes dance (this was the year after she’d insisted that the passed appetizers be vegan). I heard her take a deep breath, inhaling through her nose, before she said, “The Buddha instructs us to welcome new life in the spirit of gladness and joy.”

“Mother.”

“Satya,” she corrected, touching my knee beneath the blanket.

I felt my lips curl. “Satya. They’re paying some woman to donate her egg. They’re paying another woman to carry a baby for them. And this woman, Dad’s new wife, is seriously no good.”

She reached forward, placing her cool hands on mine. “Change is the only constant,” she intoned. “Sorrow is like a leaf in a stream. Sit on the banks. Watch it pass.”

“You may recall,” I said, with some asperity, “offering me slightly different advice before the Barneys sample sale.”

She smiled. Serenely. Indicating her plain robes, she said, “Suffering ends when craving ends,” like this was a message of incredible profundity instead of something her guru had probably cribbed from a Starbucks cup. “I was lost to myself in New York. Now I’ve come home. So what about you, Bettina? What is it you crave? How can you find your way home?”

“I’ve got a ticket on the five-thirty flight to LaGuardia,” I said. It wasn’t like I could tell her that home was forever lost to me, because home was the five of us, together, the way we used to be. Nor did I mention that, hoping against hope, I’d bought a ticket for her, too.

She rose easily to her feet and walked me to another fountain, this one outdoors, a verdigris-green bowl into which water trickled from a sculpted flower. We sat there in silence, smelling sage and some flowers I didn’t recognize. “Be well,” she said. I knew it was a dismissal. She kissed my cheek and glided off to her chores.

It wasn’t until I’d dropped off the rental car and was flying back to New York that I figured out what else I wanted: my father’s safety, his happiness, an assurance that he would not get his heart broken again. These were perfectly reasonable things to desire. Trey was too wrapped up in Violet’s new teeth and soiled diapers to care; Tommy was too busy chasing women who thought it was witty when a man sang a heavy-metal cover of “Sunny Came Home”; my mother had renounced the world entirely; which meant that I would have to keep my father safe. If I did that, maybe I could keep India’s bony, grasping hands off our money… and maybe I could have a chance at the thing I most missed and most wanted: my family back.