Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Charlotte, Willow observed, didn’t seem to mind her father’s butter substitute, or even the fact that although Uncle Spencer’s waffle looked perfect, it had a strangely bitter aftertaste that Willow presumed had something to do with the soy milk. Her cousin sat in her skimpy white shorts with her bare legs underneath her in one of the antique ladder-back chairs around the dining room table, happily cutting the waffle apart with her fork, occasionally reaching down to peel a bit of burned skin off her thigh.

Abruptly she looked up at Willow and said, “Some teenagers are going to have a bonfire and their own party tonight at the club.” That evening they were all going to the annual midsummer blowout at the Contour Club, which was one of the reasons why Grandmother wanted everyone here this particular weekend: She liked to show off her family.

“Are you going to go?”

“I might. Connor told me about it,” she said. Connor, Willow knew, was a fifteen-year-old who came to the club under duress, but when he was there Charlotte didn’t take her eyes off him. He never went near the pool, had no interest in golf, but twice in the last week the two girls had watched him play tennis. It was clear he was one of the few members of the Contour Club who might have been able to give Aunt Catherine a little competition. He had green eyes-though the girls had only seen them one time, because he almost always wore sunglasses-a little dark fuzz above his lip, and hair as black as Charlotte’s string bikini.

“When were you talking to Connor?”

“He called.”

“Really?”

“Well, he called across the grass.”

“To you?”

Charlotte shrugged, and Willow guessed that small shoulder spasm meant that Connor had yelled across the grass by the Contour Club’s terrace to some other teenager about the bonfire on Saturday night, and Charlotte had overheard him.

“Anyway, I think I might go,” Charlotte murmured.

“You can’t have a bonfire until it’s dark out, and Grandmother will want us to go home by eight or eight thirty.”

“My dad will pick me up in that case,” she said, and then she called into the kitchen where her father was still at work beside the waffle iron, “Right, Dad?”

“Right what, honey?”

“Some of the kids are having a bonfire tonight. Can I go?”

“You mean at the club?”

“Uh-huh.”

He strolled into the dining room with a dishtowel slung over his shoulder. “I think a bonfire sounds nice. Can grown-ups go, too?”

“Nope. Just kids.”

“Too bad. How old will the kids be?”

“Oh, my age-and some older kids, too, of course, so the adults don’t need to worry.”

He smiled. “The presence of teenagers is supposed to make me worry less?”

“Well, you know, in terms of the fire. There will be older kids there so you don’t need to fear we’ll, like, burn down the woods.”

“Gotcha.”

“So we can go?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“The thing is, it might go on a little later than the cocktail party you and Mom will be at,” she said.

“I understand. We’ll obviously have a couple of cars. I don’t mind hanging around so I can drive you girls home.”

“Thank you, Dad.”

Willow watched her uncle, and she thought that he might have been about to lean over and kiss his daughter on her forehead, but then he seemed to think better of the idea. Maybe he thought he’d embarrass her. Instead he bent down and kissed his nephew on the boy’s cheek, oblivious to the long tendrils of drool that were hanging off the infant’s chin or that linked his mouth and his hand like filaments from a spider’s web. Then Uncle Spencer returned to the kitchen, where Willow heard the waffle iron scrape along the counter as he lifted the metal lid.

“See how easy that was?” Charlotte said. “My dad usually says yes to the things that don’t involve any work, so he can say no to the things that do. We can go.”

“You can go. I’m not sure I want to hang around with a bunch of teenagers.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Won’t you be nervous?”

“I’m sure there will be thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds there, too.”

“And sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.”

“Doubt it. Anyone around here old enough to drive has better places to go on a Saturday night than the Contour Club.”

Willow heard her mother pad lightly down the steps from the second floor. She had been upstairs showering and getting dressed.

“Ask your mom if you can go,” Charlotte said to her now. “Tell her my dad said it was okay with him, and he’d drive us home.”

Reminding herself that she could change her mind that afternoon if she didn’t want to tag along with Charlotte while her cousin lied about her age to a bunch of tenth- and eleventh-graders, she nodded, and when her mother wandered into the dining room-her hair in a towel because it was wet, but her eyes more refreshed than they’d been before she had climbed into the shower-she asked if she, too, could go to the bonfire.

Catherine stood at the baseline of the northernmost of the four courts at the Contour Club Saturday morning, a wire basket of yellow tennis balls at her feet. The sun was behind her, and she allowed herself a hearty grunt with each serve into the ether on the other side of the net, the exhalations conjuring like a faint breeze across her tongue the dim but pleasurable memory of that single slice of her mother’s bologna she’d eaten surreptitiously before leaving with Sara and the girls for the club. She could feel sweat trickling down her shoulder blades and puddling in the small of her back. The grunts, she knew, were making the older men on the court beside her uncomfortable. At the Contour Club, people did not grunt-especially when they were practicing their serve all alone. Even those few members who actually lived in New Hampshire year-round knew enough not to grunt. Grunting, as her mother would say with a sniff, was awfully animalistic. And though Nan was preternaturally athletic for someone her age, she also believed it was inappropriate-unseemly, she would have said-to be too competitive. Grunters, it was clear, were people who tried way too hard.

The first time her mother had watched her play in a tournament in college-just after Catherine had discovered the power grunting added to her game-she had pulled her aside after the match and asked her what sort of unladylike gremlin had taken over her mouth. Catherine knew instantly what her mother was referring to, but she had won that morning against a high-seeded girl who was two years older than she was, and so she wasn’t about to stop grunting.

“UNNHH!” she cried out now, as she felt the wind from her swing on her legs.

She wasn’t exactly sure why she was taking such pleasure this morning in her grunts-each sharp, abbreviated syllable sounded downright melodious in her ear, and she loved the feel of her teeth against her tongue as she finished-but she understood that on some level this was (as her sister-in-law the therapist would say) a hostile gesture. Still, why she should be feeling hostile here and now was not entirely clear to her. After all, Charlotte and her niece seemed happy enough at the pool, her brother was holding up their generation’s honor at old Walter Durnip’s funeral, Sara was dozing on a blanket in the shade with Patrick, and Spencer was off at some garden nursery, seeing if there was anything at all the experts there could suggest to buffer the sad remains of the garden from the deer.

The deer. She paused with the tennis ball in her hand and rolled her thumb over the fuzz. She wondered if she was actually angry right now at the deer for devouring the garden. Her husband’s garden. It was possible, she decided. But it wasn’t likely: She viewed the garden with the same benign distance that she tolerated Charlotte’s glitter cosmetics. It demanded a tad more of her attention than she cared to invest, but it was essentially harmless.