Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Her mother would be proud: Going directly from the plane to the tennis court. Now, that was vigorous.

Inside the shoulder bag in which she kept her cell phone and her computer were four unopened Slim Jims. Spencer, of course, knew nothing about her secret stash of beef jerky-about, in truth, any of her secret stashes of meat. She hid them along with her Altoids and those potent Listerine PocketPak strips of paper-thin mint that melted instantly on your tongue and she presumed were designed more to encourage better oral sex than oral hygiene. She considered whether she should tell Spencer she had to run to the ladies’ room so she could scarf down one of the Slim Jims, but her secret desire for meat wasn’t as powerful as a smoker’s need for nicotine. She was not uncomfortable and she could wait.

She told herself that she needed to approach the coming ten days with a good attitude. Or, at least, not a bad one. She would play tennis, a little golf, she would swim. And there were worse ways to spend fifteen or twenty minutes in the morning than weeding a vegetable garden or deadheading rows of annuals. Had it been all that unpleasant to plant the gardens in the first place? Not really.

Moreover, soon she would get to see her daughter-though, these days, Charlotte was as likely to be a source of anxiety as she was emotional quietude or maternal pride. She adored the girl, but she didn’t look forward to the way she and Charlotte could fight over nothing. Charlotte knew precisely how to push her buttons: which slang annoyed her the most, which music she found the most offensive. She was like her father in that anything could lead to a confrontation, any interaction could become a power struggle: which bathing suit to wear, when to go to sleep, whether it was appropriate to read Cosmopolitan in the orthodontist’s office waiting room-whether an orthodontist should even have Cosmopolitan in his office waiting room. The child knew exactly where to leave her drool-swaddled retainer to cause her mother the most discomfort (the mouse pad beside the living room computer one day, atop whatever magazine Catherine was reading the next), and exactly which cosmetics were absolutely off-limits and therefore she simply had to use (the lids of which she would be sure to leave askew on her mother’s vanity).

Before she had left for her grandmother’s home for the summer, she’d even begun to challenge the antimeat, antileather, antizoo dictates of their household. She wanted a leather skirt. Leather shoes. Catherine suspected that she’d been to McDonald’s. Hormones were starting to course through the girl like river rapids, and Catherine hoped they wouldn’t transform a difficult child into an ungovernable adolescent.

When Spencer had finished with the forms for the rent-a-car, they each grabbed their suitcases and carry-ons, their tennis rackets and golf clubs, and labored their way through the tiny concourse and out into the small parking lot. The sun was still high and the air was warm. She thought it irrational that with a week of tennis and gardening and after-dinner family badminton challenges before her she was still so filled with anxiety.

But, of course, she also understood why that disquiet was there.

Spencer stood in front of the vegetable garden, dinner behind him and the sun at the very tip of the highest of the scalloped foothills to the west, and considered going inside to boot up one of the laptop computers that sat inside the house in their nylon ballistic carriers. Perhaps the Internet held a solution to this problem with the deer. Sure, there had been no way to stop them in Connecticut, but that was both because there were so many and they were so comfortable in the Long Ridge suburbs. One time when he was inching along in traffic just south of exit 34 on the Merritt Parkway-exit 34, barely thirty miles from his office near the Empire State Building-he counted nineteen in a single, mile-long stretch nibbling the delicate April buds that grew on the trees just beyond the asphalt. The animals would pause, raising their heads so he could see clearly their great black marble eyes and their eyelashes-as long and lovely as human bangs-and then they would resume eating.

The only predator he knew of in Fairfield County was his neighbor Rick Salieri and his Ford Expedition: Salieri had managed to slam into deer on three separate occasions.

Spencer was sure there couldn’t possibly be as many deer here in this part of New Hampshire, and they couldn’t possibly be as sassy or fat. Not with all the hunting that must occur in the fall. Not with winters here so much colder and longer than in southern Connecticut. The snow pack so deep. This herd had to be a reasonable-a manageable-size. Plus, here Spencer knew he had that lupine to work with. Clearly deer hated lupine, and as big as the garden was, it was still a small island in the midst of a sea of the stuff. It grew like grass, except that it was waist high and the roots were like vines. If only he could find the right Web site for gardeners or wildlife management…

Perhaps he could somehow build an impenetrable tangle of lupine, a barrier that would keep the animals at bay.

He was imagining exactly such a wall-a hedgerow made of lupine, the enclosure creating a secret garden of almost Victorian sensibility-when he realized his brother-in-law, John, was standing beside him, holding two bottles of beer by their long, thin necks. He’d already pulled the tops off them both, and he handed one to Spencer.

“You’re depressed,” John said to him with mock gravity and earnestness. “I understand.”

Spencer took a swallow. “I’m not finished.”

“You plan to sleep out here?”

He smiled. “I won’t go that far. But I am shocked. How could everything have been thriving only yesterday?”

On the other side of the house they could hear the squeals from their girls as they played badminton in the yard against Grandmother and Catherine. Catherine wasn’t as proficient at whacking birdies as she was tennis balls, but she was a Seton and thus had a genetic ability to swing things-rackets and golf clubs and, in the summer she’d lived at home immediately after college and thus wound up a part of the Brick Church’s co-ed softball team, a baseball bat-with hereditary competence. Sara was nursing Patrick on the porch.

“Well, I presume it was only yesterday when the deer discovered what kind of good eating we’d put in the ground for them,” John answered.

“They’ll be back tonight, you know.”

“And they’ll bring their friends. Yes, I do know.”

“I remember one year in Connecticut-the first year we tried to have a garden-they devoured the whole plot in two nights.”

“It will take them more than two to finish off this one. Unless there’s a whole herd that’s interested.”

“I know they’re just acting like deer… but I really didn’t think this would happen.”

“Personally, I figured we’d lose the garden to rabbits. Or raccoons.”

“It’s like a car accident.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad. You sound like one of your news releases.”

Above them a bat darted past in the twilight, then another. The bats lived in the room Nan used for storage above the garage, and when Spencer was leading the charge to get the seeds in the ground he took comfort in their presence: A tiny pipistrelle bat, he knew, ate as many as three thousand mosquitoes on a warm summer night; a colony of brown bats-say 150 animals strong-would consume eighteen million rootworms in a year. He squatted now and ran his fingers over the ravaged tendrils of one of the rows of what would have been snow peas. His mother-in-law’s golden retriever had wandered outside, and when the dog saw him the animal ambled over and put a front paw on his knees. He scratched the back of the dog’s ears and stroked his neck. Then he wrapped an arm around the canine’s strong chest and allowed the creature to lick the side of his face.