Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

The girls and the women in the yard batted the shuttlecock back across the net at each other six, eight, ten times, and each moment when her niece or her daughter would strike the red rubber tip Sara thought for sure they would finish off their older relatives, the game would end, and they would all go inside together. Nan was always indefatigable, however, even now at seventy, and Catherine was nothing if not competitive. Just when Sara was certain that the children had put the previous two generations away, Catherine raced back and hit a long, high lob from the very edge of the baseline that sent Charlotte reeling backward. And though the girl was able to return her mother’s desperate shot, her own comeback was soft and Nan was waiting for it at the net, where she slammed it into the grass at the feet of her lunging granddaughters. The old folks were coming back, and Sara feared now that she might be outside with her son on her chest until it was too dark for any living creatures but the bats.

There was chaos in the kitchen Saturday morning, the very last day in July. Some of it was a simple result of the reality that the household had swollen from three people to eight, two of whom were planning on attending a funeral that day before going to the club. But part of it was due as well to the nature of Nan Seton: The woman had the vigor of a cruise director when it came to outdoor activities and organizing her brood, but her energy level deflated like a blood pressure cuff-you could almost hear the hiss of escaping air-when she was faced with a task that demanded long-term coordination, concentration, and planning. It was one thing to get her granddaughters into age-appropriate swimwear (though Nan was confident that Charlotte’s choices in swimwear were inappropriate for any age) and then to the club; it was quite another to redo her kitchen. As a result, the room was in serious need of a makeover. The oven door that summer didn’t quite close (which meant that the plastic dials for the burners on the stove had started to melt like images from a Salvador Dali painting); the dishwasher door did close but it demanded two hands and a back that was sturdy; and Nan insisted on keeping the electric skillet in a section of the counter that meant she had to wind the long cord around a blender with chunks of calcified water clinging to the rotor blades like barnacles, a toaster with sufficient bread crumbs in its base to stuff a turkey, and the baby bottles that had appeared in the night with the speed of button mushrooms in a wet summer. And, of course, because the telephone in the kitchen still had a receiver that was tethered to the wall unit with a plastic-coated wire, it was not uncommon when two Setons or McCulloughs were trying to cook for one inadvertently to trip or tie up the other.

This morning, moreover, Spencer was making waffles. Consequently, the waffle iron-an antique that looked more like a device the secret police in a third world nation might use to extract a confession from a political prisoner than a kitchen appliance-was taking up space on the counter as well. The batter, made with soy milk and without eggs, was runnier than regular batter, and so the waffle iron had glacierlike daggers of camel-colored globules running down three of its four sides.

Spencer suspected this morning might not be the best time to be making waffles because his mother-in-law and John were trying to get out the door for a nine thirty funeral. But he told himself he was making the waffles for Charlotte and Willow. He understood this justification wasn’t quite true-he guessed he probably would be making waffles now even if he was the only person in the house who was going to eat them-but he felt like waffles, and wasn’t this his vacation, too? Besides, he had checked the vegetable garden as soon as he had woken up, and he’d seen that the deer had returned to continue the job they had begun Thursday night. Worse, they had discovered the strawberries, which had arrived weeks late but now, finally, were just about ripe for the picking, and then ravaged the leaves on the raspberry bushes. This meant there would be no strawberry shortcake-or strawberry soup or strawberry smoothies or strawberry pasta-made with their very own strawberries while he was here this week, and there might be no raspberries ever this summer.

Spencer hadn’t anticipated a huge crop from the transplants this season, but he had expected enough for the family. And so now he was repressing his profound disappointment with food. With waffles.

Around him there was chaos: Mrs. Seton was telling her daughter that the girls’ suits had to be hanging outside on the line, but still no one could find Charlotte’s suitable Speedo (including Charlotte); John was emptying day-old coffee grounds from the stovetop percolator his mother had used since the Eisenhower administration into the paper grocery bag (already tearing at the bottom from something gooey and wet that had been deposited there the night before after dinner); and his nephew was howling like a police siren while Sara, reduced almost to despair, walked the baby back and forth in the living room. Willow, according to fast-developing family lore the only antidote in the world to a full-blown Patrick Seton tirade, was outside somewhere, searching with Charlotte for the missing swimsuit.

Spencer knew that if he focused on anything other than the physical act of cooking, he would become involved in the bedlam around him and grow angry. Angrier, actually: Already he was exasperated, maddened by the sheer disorganization, by the annoying way everyone was speaking at cross purposes, and (most certainly) by the mess.

Finally Willow appeared, rescuing her mother from her younger brother-a child who had been sobbing for so long with Sara that although he had stopped crying, he now had hiccups that were heart-wrenching-and Spencer was able to concentrate on breakfast. With a decided effort to be serene, he pulled up the top of the press, trimmed away the half-cooked stalactites of batter from the sides, and deposited onto an antique china plate a waffle at once so perfectly square, evenly browned, and supernaturally fluffy that it looked like it belonged in a gourmet cooking magazine. There was not a corner of this house that did not hold for him a memory of what it was like to be a teenager, away from home and college for the first time in his life, making real money-or what seemed like real money at the time-and spending his days hiking and swimming and hitting tennis balls with the lovely young woman he knew even then he would marry. Why, he told himself as he savored the sight of this oh-so-perfect waffle, should a little chaos here trouble him now?

Willow brought Patrick over to the plate on the counter and said to her brother, “This, little man, is what a waffle is supposed to look like. Pretty good, huh?”

The baby hiccupped then gurgled.

“Then this one has to be yours,” Spencer said. “I picked up some Soy-garine at the health food store on the way home from the club yesterday afternoon.”

“The waffles my parents make always pop out of the toaster, and they look like burnt toast,” she said.

“Please, enjoy it. Ask Charlotte if she’s ready for one, too, okay?”

The girl nodded, stepped around the dishwasher door that hung open like a shin-level metal shelf-a bruise-inducing ledge from another era-scooted past her grandmother, who was saying something about everyone’s lack of time if they wanted to get to the club at a decent hour, and called out the front door to her cousin.

JOHN STOOD in the lambent sun of the morning before the vegetable garden in his wing tips, holding a paisley necktie in his hands. He was relieved that he and Sara had planned on his going straight to work after breakfast on Monday, because it meant that he actually had a decent pair of shoes with him this weekend and therefore would not have to attend Walter Durnip’s funeral in either golf cleats or sneakers.