WHERE IT REALLY ALL STARTED was with Ray.

Ray, for as long as I’d known her, and which, since she’s my mother, has been my entire life, had been a seeker. She was a seeker long before me too, but nothing she’d found had ever worked out very well.

First she was seeking for world peace and universal justice, and she went to rallies, and Boone has a picture of her with about a million other people marching on the mall in Washington, D.C. But nothing ever came of that because of big business and the oil companies and the military-industrial complex actually running the country.

Then she was seeking for women’s rights and sisterhood, and she belonged to a lot of consciousness-raising groups and stopped shaving her legs and washing her hair. But that didn’t work out either because, even though Ray believes in equal pay for equal work, she got sick of belonging to book clubs that wouldn’t read books if the authors were males.

After that she was an environmental activist, and she belonged to this guerrilla gardeners’ society that used to sneak into parks and vacant lots and plant tomatoes when no one was looking. That was when she decided to go to law school and study environmental law. She was still seeking to save the planet then, but she figured it wouldn’t hurt to save it while earning a regular salary, with health benefits.

That was when she met Boone, who was working as a financial planner and painting on the side, which was stifling his creative flow. So after Ray graduated from law school, they moved to Vermont, because by then Ray was seeking the simple life and Boone was willing to do anything that would let him paint in the daytime. They were planning to live on a farm and raise organic vegetables and free-range chickens and make their own maple syrup and toothpaste and yogurt, and Ray was going to learn to weave. But that didn’t work out either because first they had cutworms, and then Ray turned out to be allergic to chicken feathers, and when they boiled the sap to make maple syrup, all the wallpaper in the kitchen peeled off. So they gave up and moved into town, which is when they had me.

Actually Boone never totally gave up on the simple life, because he still had a garden in the yard beside his painting shed. Also he was always quoting Henry David Thoreau, who was famous for living at Walden Pond in a house he built by himself, growing his own beans, and then writing a book about it.

Boone would say things like “‘Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.’” Once when Ray bought a new living-room couch, he said, “‘I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.’”

Ray said that he could sit on a pumpkin all he wanted, but she was sick of the broken springs poking her in the behind.

Anyway the new couch was not velvet. It was blue plaid.

But Ray never stopped seeking, and ever since I was eight or nine or so, she’d been seeking for spiritual fulfillment and the deeper meaning of life. Basically that meant that she kept trying all these different churches, but none of the ones she tried was ever right because she never liked any of them enough to settle down.

For Winton Falls this was weird, since people here don’t change much when it comes to religion. Most of the French kids are Catholic, like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents probably all the way back to Saint Peter, and they go to the Church of the Holy Nativity at the end of Spring Street. The Protestant kids are mostly Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, or Episcopalians. Aaron Pennebaker and Jeannie Greenberg are Jewish, and Earl Barney is a Jehovah’s Witness and goes to the Kingdom Hall over on Route 7A. But whatever people are here, they usually stay that way.

Except Ray. She kept switching from place to place all the time, trying to find her perfect spiritual fit. She made me think of a book I had when I was little called The Missing Piece, which was about this sad little circle with a triangle-shaped chunk taken out of it, rolling around the world searching for the perfect little triangle that would make it whole. She took classes in yoga breathing and she tried the Way of Tao Meditation Center in Richford, and for a while she went to Wiccan meetings with a woman named Clarice who wore caftans and necklaces shaped like pentagrams. For a couple of months she even belonged to the Enlightened Brethren, who met every week in somebody’s garage and talked about the end of the world. And she tried all the regular churches too.

Boone used to say that Ray shopped for spiritual experiences the way other women shopped for shoes, and he’d joke about the flavor of the month. Boone wasn’t seeking. He was happy with oil paint and Henry David Thoreau.

The first hint I had that Ray had found something new came on a Sunday morning at the beginning of August before school had started. I could tell by the way Ray came up the stairs, fast, with her heels clicking on the steps like castanets. She only did that if something big was up and we were late for it. She poked her head in the doorway of my bedroom, where I was lying on my bed reading Anne of Green Gables. I had just reached the part where Anne had bought hair dye from a peddler and it turned her hair green.

“Octavia, you’re not dressed yet,” Ray said.

Second hint.

“Yes, I am,” I said, because I was. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

“I must have forgotten to tell you,” Ray said, which made me suspicious right there. Ray never forgot anything.

“Tell me what?” I said.

“We’re going to a new church,” Ray said. She sounded bright, but a little nervy, the way people do when they’re talking up something that they know in their heart of hearts you’re going to hate. By this time, I’d been to enough new churches (etc.) with Ray to last a lifetime.

“I don’t want to go,” I said. “I want to stay home with Boone.”

Boone does not go to church. He says that spiritual experiences are not meant to be social events. Ray says that Boone is a hopeless cause.

After all the dragging around to churches, I wished Ray would consider me a hopeless cause too, but when I asked, she wouldn’t go for it. To be a hopeless cause, Ray said, you have to be over twenty-five.

“I want you to give this a chance,” Ray said. “I’ve been there several times, and they’re lovely people. You might actually enjoy yourself. Get up out of there and put on that nice green skirt. And comb your hair.”

“I’m reading,” I said.

“You can read when we get home,” Ray said.

Looking back, it was right then that I wish I’d had an Ominous Knee.

Because then I’d have had some warning. It would have been twinging all over the place, telling me of the coming storm.