Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

She listened for a moment, but over the sounds of the music and the conversation and the clinking of ice against glass she heard nothing from either Catherine or Gary.

“Did you see Mom?” Charlotte asked her, and the girl suddenly looked young and small to Nan, almost tiny.

“Yes, dear,” she said. “Here she comes now.” From behind the barbecue they watched Catherine emerge. She was alone, she looked vaguely uncomfortable, and Nan noticed that the glass in her hands was empty. A moment later Nan saw Gary strolling down the hill toward the bonfire, away from the cocktail party, his hands in the pockets of his shorts. If she hadn’t known that he, too, had been behind that massive wall of stones, she would have presumed that he’d materialized out of thin air.

THEY WERE DRIVING HOME in a caravan of two cars, the minivan that Catherine and Spencer had rented, followed by John and Sara’s navy blue Volvo. Nan was riding with John and Sara, sharing the backseat with baby Patrick, while the girls went ahead in the rental. Nan didn’t mind sharing the backseat with the baby, but he was a tad fussy right now because he smelled like a Dumpster, and it was taking a lot of work to keep him from howling. Still, if she wished she were in the other car it was primarily because she would have liked to have watched her daughter and son-in-law up close to see if there was any tension between them. When they were assembling in the parking lot of the club a few minutes ago, Spencer had wondered aloud whether they’d arrive home and actually witness deer racing away from the yard when their headlights washed over the garden, and with a real edge in her voice Catherine had asked him to let go of the deer-Get over it, she had said-and to please move on.

Nevertheless, her distance now from Catherine and Spencer proved calming. Reassuring. By the time they pulled into her driveway, she told herself that she hadn’t witnessed anything inappropriate when she and Charlotte had been returning to the clubhouse from the bonfire. She had seen Catherine talking to a teenager at a cocktail party. Maybe Gary had been swatting at a mosquito near Catherine’s ear or pulling a bug from her hair. There were a million innocent reasons why the two of them might have been standing behind a barbecue rather than, say, by the glass doors or the tiki torches or-along with almost all of the other adults who were outside at that moment-near the long tables with the finger foods and the booze. For all she knew, Gary was regaling Catherine with stories about how her daughter had been spending her days at the club. What a dolphin the child had become in the pool. How nicely she dove.

The cars arrived back home together, and while John and Sara took the baby upstairs she watched her granddaughters and Catherine and Spencer climb from their vehicle. She noticed that the two girls still seemed to be giggling, and they were strolling to the edge of the garden with Spencer. Catherine walked past her to the front door of the house, moving, Nan observed, with her head down as if she were an embarrassed teenager. She recalled the time Catherine had been fifteen years old, and she and some summer fling had managed to fog up the windows in Catherine’s bedroom upstairs. It had been a chilly, rainy August afternoon and they had closed the windows against the cold. When Nan had gone upstairs to tell the young man it was time to go home, she discovered that he and Catherine had been petting with such vigor that the glass panes looked like a shower stall. Catherine had the same guilty expression on her face now.

After she heard the screen door swing shut, she joined Spencer and the girls at the perimeter of the garden. Even in the moonlight, they couldn’t see much. They could distinguish the corn plants that Spencer had returned to their upright positions, gently showering the roots with clay and dirt, and they could make out the potato hills. They could see the twine that had been stretched like tightropes over the rows of carrots and the stakes that were nearest them. But that was about it.

Spencer sighed so loudly that Nan and the girls heard him, and then mumbled something about a short walk.

“Dad is really bummed out, isn’t he?” Charlotte said, once he had started off into the night.

“Yes, he is,” Nan said. “But he’ll get over it.” She hadn’t meant to sound unsympathetic, but she could tell by the way her granddaughter was looking at her-her lower lip drooping slightly, her eyebrows raised into a dome-that she had. All she had meant to suggest was that, like most men, her father was overreacting. Men made a big deal about pain and a big deal about disappointment. Then they got over both. At least they did if they had any character, and she knew Spencer certainly had some. He had a temper and that annoying eccentricity about meat, but otherwise he was pretty solid.

“Don’t stay out here too long, girls,” she continued after a moment, when neither Charlotte nor Willow said anything. Charlotte had turned away from her, and-not unlike her father a moment ago-was staring into the dark. It dawned on Nan suddenly that her two children and their spouses were so focused on other things that they had all gone into the house or into the fields without a single word to their daughters: not a word about the evening, not a word about getting ready for bed. John and Sara had raced inside with Patrick, Catherine had gone inside with her tail between her legs, guilty over… Nan didn’t know what, but guilty over a desire, a word, perhaps even an act. (No, it hadn’t gone that far, Nan quickly reassured herself.) And Spencer had gone for a walk, unable to think about anything but his distress over this ridiculous garden.

She felt a slight rush of annoyance at all four of them, both for their dereliction of parental duty and for taking her for granted. They were all so absorbed in their own lives that either they hadn’t thought for a moment of their daughters or they had presumed that Grandmother would take care of the pair. Get their teeth brushed, their hair combed. Get them into their nightgowns. Settle them down with their books.

Did they-John and Sara, Catherine and Spencer-have any idea how complicated it was to settle the two girls down at the end of the day? Of course they didn’t. Last night, everyone’s first together in the country, the girls had stayed up till eleven thirty with their parents, showing them what they had learned about bridge, telling them about their nature hikes, and regaling them with their stories of their days at the club. The children (and, Nan reminded herself, they were children) had collapsed into their beds, exhausted. It wasn’t usually that easy.

She paused with her hands on her hips and stared at the house. She was torn between her belief that these girls needed a grown-up right now and her sense that her own two children were taking advantage of her-as, in truth, they did for weeks at a time with the Seton New England Boot Camp. She loved her grandchildren, she loved them very much. But she was a glorified babysitter, that’s what she was.

She could hear her breath steam from her nose, and she shook her head. Then, convinced that any second she would stop herself and turn around and herd the children inside, she started toward the front door. She did not stop herself, however, not this time. She went through the front hall and past the living room, up the stairs-pausing briefly on the second-floor landing where she heard John and Sara down the hall whispering as they arranged Patrick’s crib and started preparing the baby for bed, saw the shut bathroom door and understood that Catherine was inside there running a bath-and then to her own sanctum sanctorum on the third floor. She sat on her bed with her hands on the edge of the mattress, vexed by her children. When she would recall this moment in the coming days, she would wonder if that sensation of pique had in actuality been apprehension.