Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

She wondered what Charlotte would say when she told her she was coming to New York this weekend. She liked her mom’s idea that she and her cousin might celebrate their birthdays together. It might be a little strange with her father and Uncle Spencer not talking to each other, but they’d work it out. They were grown-ups. Besides, that was their problem. Not hers. With that deposition looming, she had enough to figure out on her own.

The next morning, Wednesday, Spencer was returning to work, and so he gave in completely. He allowed Catherine to put the jam on his bread-even opening the jar for him so he didn’t have to hold the glass between his legs and hope to God that he didn’t stain his khaki pants as he struggled to unscrew the lid-and the toothpaste on his toothbrush. She held his cardigan sweater for him as he slid his left arm through the sleeve and then discreetly safety-pinned both the right side and the right sleeve to his shirt-a considerably better plan than his big idea, which was simply to try to wad the dangling sleeve into a front pants pocket. Now they were standing together on the sidewalk while the building doorman was hailing a cab. When one arrived, Catherine offered him a restrained kiss on his cheek and then stood aside while the doorman held open the door. He slid gingerly into the backseat, and he was off.

Alone, he gazed out the window at the theater ads on the buses beside him in traffic. After dinner last night neither he nor Catherine had brought up her admission that she still ate meat. In their bedroom she had helped him undress and get into his pajamas and then gotten ready for bed herself, but it was clear that neither of them had any desire to discuss her revelations further. She ate meat; now he knew it. Apparently she wasn’t going to stop and he was, by then, too tired and beaten up to fight… or, perhaps, even care all that much. At least about the meat. After all, the issue wasn’t that his wife desired dead things. The issue, clearly, was that she was furious with him, and those Slim Jims she was wolfing in secret were more filled with animosity and bitterness than they were beef and mechanically separated chicken. The truce had continued this morning through breakfast.

With the fingers on his left hand he gingerly adjusted his sling under his sweater. He wondered exactly what he had done to anger his wife so-was it years of being a pill or was all this hostility triggered recently?-and what it would take to make her happy again.

DOMINIQUE THOUGHT some men looked distinguished with beards, especially such elegant European actors as Sean Connery and Ian Holm. When Americans and her fellow Canadians grew them, however, it often struck her as a mistake-especially these days. The hip beard this season was a patchy heroin-addict fuzz, whiskers that seemed to struggle atop raw cheeks and chins the way bearberry or sandwort strained toward the sun on wind-blasted tundra. Spencer’s beard, when he was through growing it out, was never going to strike anyone as distinguished. It looked like it would become the sort of close-cropped beard that might, if nothing else, be neat-she recalled her favorite image of Marvin Gaye from an album she’d owned in junior high school-but it might just as easily become the kind that would hang laconically down his chest like a bib should Spencer ever stop trimming it. It was spotted with white and black and traces of red. It made his high forehead look even higher.

She watched him run the fingers of his left hand over the brand-new, left-handed keyboard they had purchased for his computer and then punch the buttons that turned on the monitor, the tower, and the printer. He looked like he had missed using them. He rolled the special left-handed mouse back and forth across the rectangular rubber pad with the FERAL logo.

“We have voice input software on order,” she told him. “You’ll be able to dictate your memos and news releases right into the computer.”

“What fun. Thank you.”

“A new sound card, too. And extra RAM. Apparently, you’ll need it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you bring your Palm with you?” she asked him.

He shook his head ever so slightly and motioned with his eyes down at his sling. “I can’t use it with my left hand. Can’t draw the characters, can’t use the stylus.”

“In time you’ll be able to.”

“Maybe.”

“How was your cab ride this morning?”

“Fine.”

“I presume you didn’t get sick?”

“Not this time.”

“That must have been a relief.”

She heard one of Spencer’s publicity minions laughing in the corridor at something Keenan had said, and wanted desperately now to be with them instead of alone in this office with Spencer. She knew she was supposed to say something about how good he looked or how wonderful it was to have him back-how happy she was just to see him alive. But she certainly wasn’t about to lie and tell him he looked terrific, because he didn’t. He looked horrid: That beard was a disaster, he had bags under his eyes that resembled marsupial pouches, and his skin was the color of whey. The idea that this was a man her organization actually used to trot out to news programs and talk shows and speeches before crowded auditoriums astonished her. Had Spencer McCullough ever once been even remotely telegenic? It seemed inconceivable.

But she knew that he had been. Recently, in fact. Seven or eight weeks ago.

Now he was a shabbily dressed, sloppily bearded, debilitated wretch in a safety-pinned cardigan. This was her director of communications? This guy was supposed to sit in one of those boxy armchairs opposite Katie Couric and Jane Pauley?

He picked up a sealed cardboard carton about half the size of a shoe box with a long serial number stenciled in black ink across the side. “What’s this?” he asked her.

“I believe that’s your headset. For your telephone. So you don’t need to hold the receiver in your hand.”

“Oh, goodie. I can be just like a telemarketer.”

“Hands-free communication.”

He put the box back down on his desk and gently rapped the lid with his knuckles. “Well. Thank you for this, too.”

“You’re welcome. We want to do everything we can to make your return to work as seamless as possible. We want-”

“Everything’s fine,” he said to her, his voice as calm and sonorous as an incoming tide. He touched her elbow when he cut her off and she was able to suppress the need to flinch. Barely. “I know what you want, and I thank you for… for everything. Okay?”

She glanced down at the spot where his fingers were separated from the flesh on her arm by a wisp of linen fabric. She nodded. She wished she enjoyed the touch of humans half as much as she did the warm fur of her dogs or the scratchy tongues of her cats.

JOHN THOUGHT the offices of Tuttle, DiSpiro, and Maroney, P.C., looked surprisingly unchanged from the period in his life when he’d toiled here. The only visible difference was the removal of Howard Mansfield’s name from the signage and letterhead since the older lawyer had become a justice on the Vermont Supreme Court. The offices sat in a renovated brick building on the Burlington waterfront that had once been an icehouse. When Burlington began to gentrify the area, the icehouse was one of the first structures to be transformed into office space. Howard Mansfield and Chris Tuttle were among the business visionaries who understood that its views of the lake and the mountains were sufficiently panoramic to justify moving an upscale law firm to what was then a still up-and-coming neighborhood.

As John strolled down the corridor, his feet positively sinking into the plush cobalt carpet, he realized just how squalid was the workplace four blocks to the east that housed the Chittenden County Public Defenders’ Office. The threadbare carpet there was no thicker than cardboard, the walls-an ivory so coated with fingerprints and grime that it now resembled the color of a T-shirt left too long on a subway grate-were peeling, and most of his lawyers’ offices were about the size of this firm’s coat closet in the waiting room. The difference in the two waiting rooms, in fact, said it all: The one here had a pair of leather couches so soft he could have slept on them, a postcard view of the mountains in New York, and tables with the latest issues of Forbes, Fortune, and that morning’s Wall Street Journal. There was coffee or ice water or tea if you simply raised your gaze at the receptionist, a polite young woman who could have passed for a Neiman Marcus model. The waiting room back in his world of PDs was a cramped cubicle with two badly cushioned wooden chairs and a box of half-broken toys for the children of the drunk drivers and mentally ill street people and insolvent check bouncers who hoped that, somehow, he and his associates could finagle for them yet one more chance.