Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

The difference-and this was what alarmed Nan periodically-was his utter unwillingness to listen to others, and the way he would dismiss those who disagreed with him when it came to matters of food and meat and animal rights. All too often he seemed more interested in animals than in humans. Than in his own family. Moreover, sometimes he seemed interested in animals in the abstract-as issues and causes-rather than as individual creatures with whom he might feel a special bond. It was as if he’d lost somewhere that little boy who would rescue a raccoon because it was furry and soft and he saw in its eyes the simple spark of life.

The irony in Nan’s mind was that there had been a time when Spencer had not simply eaten like a regular person, he’d actually been a rather good cook. A chef, even! He was nineteen and he was dating her daughter, and the two of them spent the summer (the first of many) with her in New Hampshire between their freshman and sophomore years of college. It was only a year after Richard had died, and Nan was very glad to have a man around the country house so there would be someone to empty the kitchen garbage and change the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixtures-real man’s work, in her opinion. Her daughter, Catherine, was a waitress at Gerta’s Edelweiss Garden that summer, a restaurant with postcard-perfect vistas of the ski slopes at Cannon and the new condominiums at Mittersill, while Spencer worked in the kitchen at the Steer by the Shore, a steak-and-seafood restaurant, which in lieu of a view had both a dining room big enough to accommodate bus tours and the area’s first dessert bar-a novelty back then. Spencer started there over Memorial Day Weekend as a dishwasher but, through a combination of pluck and luck and the sudden arrest of the restaurant’s second chef for cocaine possession, had ascended with meteoric efficiency. By the Fourth of July it was young Spencer McCullough who was slicing the chicken breasts and cooking the lobsters and making that delicious stuffing with the secret ingredient that tasted an awful lot like Ritz crackers and that Spencer protected like a spy. That summer she would not have been surprised if someday when he finished college Spencer had enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America or Johnson & Wales with the hope of becoming a serious chef or restaurateur.

Of course he hadn’t. By late August, when he and her daughter were done with their jobs for the summer and the boy-and in so many ways then he really was still a boy-went home to see his family in Westchester before returning to college, it was clear that he would continue on the more predictable white-collar path taken by all of her children’s friends.

And, in truth, why should she have expected him eventually to go on to cooking school? It wasn’t as if Catherine ever again wanted to have anything to do with either a restaurant’s kitchen or its dining room.

Spencer still enjoyed cooking-that was clear-and he certainly enjoyed cooking here in New Hampshire. The problem was that he now cooked like a-and there was only one word for it-weirdo. She shuddered when she thought of the odd beans and curds and funguses that he considered legitimate sources of nutrition.

Behind her she heard the screen door clap shut and for a split second it had sounded to her like a gunshot, and she thought suddenly of the deer and her idea to remove the signs that forbid hunting on her property. She turned around and saw her two granddaughters racing toward her, Willow in a blue terry-cloth cover-up and her cousin in only that minuscule string thing that both Catherine and Charlotte insisted was a bathing suit. She sighed and then prepared herself for her daily battle with the older girl: The child might have only the merest hummocks for breasts, but she still could not arrive at the Contour Club dressed like a lap dancer. It was just that simple.

John Seton was lying happily on the floor of his living room in Vermont, a wisp of black bang across his eyeglasses, watching enrapt as his son pedaled the pudgy water balloons that passed for his legs like an upside-down bicyclist. Patrick was not quite five months old, and any day now John was sure that his cherubic baby boy was going to dazzle him by overcoming his turtlelike inability to roll over and start spinning like a dervish on a ski slope. It could happen this very second, if only because the child might grow tired of feeling the Dijon mustard that in the last moment he had let loose into his diaper with the power and sound of a fire hose.

Upstairs he heard Sara in the boy’s nursery, and he presumed she was getting the baby monitor off the nightstand and throwing a couple more onesies and doll-sized socks into the baby’s suitcase. He and his wife-260 pounds of grown-ups-would share a single overnight bag, while their thirteen-pound eleven-ounce son would have to himself a piece of luggage the size of a steamer trunk. The clothes the boy wore might not be big, but he sure needed a lot of them. And then there were the pillows and the blankets and the menagerie of stuffed animals from his room here so his crib in New Hampshire would smell like his crib in Vermont.

The boy stared up at the ceiling and gurgled contentedly. He smiled at something John could neither see nor understand, and John smiled back. Then he sighed. Young Patrick was not going to roll over today-at least not this morning-and so he scooped his son up and carried him to the bathroom to change him.

As he passed through the kitchen with his boy in his arms the phone rang. He wanted to let the answering machine get it because in all likelihood it was either his office or Sara’s answering service, and today was supposed to be a day off. They were driving to his mother’s in New Hampshire, and they were hoping to leave by nine thirty-ten at the latest-so that they could stop by the club and surprise everyone while they were having lunch or whacking tennis balls or whatever it was that Mother had the girls doing at boot camp today. But he knew that if he didn’t answer the phone Sara would. She’d only been back at work for two months, and so she was still in that professional’s postpartum phase in which anything she did with one of her patients was more satisfying-and, in truth, easier-than hooking up a Hoover (either Patrick or the pump) to one of her breasts, or waking at one or five in the morning to feed the child, or trying (and failing) to quell the aneurysm-inducing stress that both of them felt when one or the other was trapped behind a hay wagon or dump truck and they were late for Patrick’s 5:30 pickup at the day-care center in their village. The place was run by two women who were loving and gentle and kind during the day, but like werewolves were transformed into something unspeakably ugly at precisely 5:31. The family of any child remaining at the Mother’s Love Nurture World at 5:45 would be charged an extra half day; three tardy pickups in a month and the child was subject to dismissal.

With his one free hand he picked the receiver from the wall like an apple and heard the secretary he shared with two other public defenders on the other end of the line.

“Hi, John. Sorry to bother you. I didn’t know if you saw the newspaper yet.”

“No,” he murmured, shaking his head despite the reality that the woman couldn’t see him. Patrick happily grabbed his nose with fingers that still resembled tiny pinchers and made a sound like a giggle.

“I hear Patrick,” Sally said.

“Yes, you do.”

“You sound like you have a cold.”

“No. I have a baby who thinks my nose is a rattle.”

“Oh, that’s cute.”

Actually, John thought, it was more painful than cute: The baby was trying to move his skull the way he himself had a moment earlier when he’d been shaking his head, and he was surprised at the amount of strength in that small hand and arm. The kid couldn’t roll over yet, but his motor skills for exactly this maneuver had been perfected with weeks of practice on a stuffed animal the size of a butternut squash that he and Sara had christened Drool Monkey.