Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“Yes, we do.”

Willow’s hair was the color of a sand dollar that has not yet been bleached by the sun. She looked up now, brushed her bangs away from her eyes, and said to her grandmother, “Maybe I’ll just have pancakes this morning, too, please.”

“What? No sausages?” Nan asked, unable to hide the surprise in her voice.

“No, thank you. Not today.”

“Hallelujah,” Charlotte said happily, and then she climbed off the chair and ran up the stairs to get dressed. The dog lifted his head, the vibrations from the human on the stairs causing his spot on the porch to shudder beneath his snout. Willow paused for a moment, and it seemed to her grandmother that there was something more she wanted to say. But then she stood, too, shrugged her shoulders and raced up the steps after her cousin.

AS SHE DROPPED the pancake batter-after nearly twenty-four hours in the refrigerator, it was thicker than pudding-onto the electric skillet, the phone rang. Nan Seton had never bothered to purchase a cordless phone, and so she made a mental note as she scooted in her slippers across the long kitchen to keep the call brief: She did not want the pancakes-which, because the batter was substantial and heavy, reminded her of small loofah sponges on the griddle-to wind up looking like charcoal briquettes.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Nan. It’s Marguerite.”

“I’m making the girls breakfast.”

“Oh, I’ll just be a minute. Do you remember how you noticed at the club yesterday that Walter Durnip’s color wasn’t very good?”

“Vaguely. He looked a little gray.”

“He did, he did. Well, he died.”

She sat on the wooden stool by the phone, and nodded to herself. “How?”

“In his sleep.”

“That’s how I want to go. What was it? A heart attack? A stroke?”

“I don’t know. But when he went to bed, he didn’t say anything to Elizabeth about how he felt. He just went to sleep, and when Elizabeth woke up this morning she knew right away he was dead.”

“He was eighty-four, wasn’t he?”

“Something like that.”

“He wasn’t even ill.”

“At least not visibly.”

“Oh, we would have known if Walter was ill. He wasn’t particularly stoic.”

Nan heard her friend laugh, but she hadn’t meant this as a joke. It was, in her mind, a simple reiteration of an obvious fact: Walter Durnip was a man, and men were notoriously unwilling to keep pain to themselves-which was where, more times than not, it belonged. As a general rule, old people who talked about their ailments made Nan Seton uncomfortable. Too much… body.

“Elizabeth doesn’t know for sure when she’s going to have the funeral yet, but it will probably be the day after tomorrow. Saturday.”

“Saturday? Too bad. Oh, well. At least by then I’ll have a houseful, so the girls won’t have to go. John and Catherine arrive tomorrow,” she said, referring not to a husband and a wife but to her son and her daughter. Nan knew from years of conversations exactly like this one with her friend Marguerite that she did not need to explain that when she said Catherine she meant Catherine and her husband, Spencer, and when she said John she meant John, his wife, Sara, and-now-their infant son, Patrick.

“How long are they staying?”

“Catherine and Spencer are both taking next week off. Isn’t that nice? They’ll be here for nine days-”

“And John and Sara are bringing the baby, right?”

“Of course.”

“You will have a houseful.”

“John and Sara will only be here for the weekend. Till Monday morning. Still, it will be good fun. I’m sure the girls miss their parents. The only hard part is going to be dinner because Spencer is just so difficult.”

“Being a vegetarian is no big deal, Nan. Lots of people are!”

“There are degrees. And most people don’t obsess about it the way he does or lecture their dinner companions the way he does. Soy milk. Soy hot dogs on the grill. Tofu. Yuck. It just makes things so complicated because I never know what to buy.”

“Make him cook!”

“He does. Sometimes that’s worse. Everything always seems to have lentils in it.”

Upstairs in the bedroom above the dining room she heard a colossal thud and then she heard the girls laughing hysterically. Charlotte, she knew from experience, always woke up in a foul mood but tended to cheer up as the morning progressed. By lunchtime, she would be charming. Willow, on the other hand, seemed to grow tired as the day wore on and if she was going to be cranky (and it was generally rare for the younger cousin to grow irritable) it was likely to be at the very end of the day. Late afternoon, just before dinner. After they had returned from the club, where she had the children in a regimen of swimming, tennis, golf, and junior bridge lessons.

“How is Elizabeth doing?” Nan asked, referring back to her and Marguerite’s mutual friend, a woman who-like her and Marguerite-was now a widow.

“Oh, I believe she’s fine,” Marguerite told her, her voice as light as a dandelion puffball in May.

“Good. Walter was a lot of work, wasn’t he?”

“A lot of work,” Marguerite agreed.

Across the kitchen, the deep black circles around the outer edges of the loofah sponge pancakes were spreading into the centers, and the acrid smell of badly burned batter was starting to waft through the house. Quickly Nan said good-bye and hung up. She flipped the pancakes, telling herself that if she scraped the creosote-like sludge off the bottom and served each one with the undercooked side up the girls would never know the difference. She didn’t believe this for a second, but she wasn’t about to waste all that good leftover batter.

WHILE THE GIRLS were picking apart their grandmother’s pancakes with their forks-each curious in her own way as to exactly how the edges of the pancakes could appear charbroiled while the insides were the consistency of mayonnaise-Charlotte’s father, Spencer, was standing before 150 executives and middle managers from the American Association of Meat Substitutes in the Ticonderoga Room in a conference center in Westchester County. The Ticonderoga Room was the largest of a series of meeting rooms in this wing of the building, all of which seemed to have been named after regional Revolutionary War landmarks (the Saratoga, the Delaware, the Yorktown Heights), though Spencer had yet to see anything anywhere in the conference center that in the slightest way reflected a colonial motif. Not so much as a bellhop in knickers and a tricornered hat, or a plugged-up wrought-iron cannon and hitching post along the exteriors.

Spencer was asked to speak here this morning both to provide the group with some light breakfast entertainment and to inspire them in their ongoing efforts to garner more (and more) refrigerator and freezer case space in the nation’s mainstream supermarkets for their garden burgers and faux sausages, their Fakin Bacon and Foney Baloney, their ground round made from seaweed and soy protein.

In today’s speech, before he got to his routine slides of the slaughterhouse in North Carolina that sent thirty-two thousand desperately frightened, squealing hogs to their death every single day (many of them dunked by mistake in vats of scalding water while still half-alive), he played a television commercial on the room’s three large TV monitors. The ad was for a more individualized torture chamber called the Microwave Home Lobster Steamer. He chose this particular commercial to warm up the crowd-get them good and indignant before they had even finished their bagels and muffins and vegan granola-because this morning he was beginning his speech with his own restaurant experiences when he was nineteen, his very first summer in Sugar Hill. He guessed he was choosing this part of his life because he and Catherine would be flying to New Hampshire tomorrow for their annual summer vacation.