Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“What? You can’t get a dog now,” she said, a slight tremor of panic in her voice. Keenan guessed she was afraid that her client-near catatonic for the vast majority of their meeting, and then suddenly sharp but oblivious to the party line for the rest-was losing his mind.

“Why?”

She looked at her watch. “Because it’s Friday morning.”

“That’s not a reason why I can’t get a dog, Paige. People all over the world get dogs on Friday mornings.”

“I meant we still have work to do.”

He paused in the doorway and smiled. “I think you and Keenan do. But I’m all set. I know my lines for Tuesday.”

“Do you?”

He nodded.

“So you’re just leaving to go get a… a companion animal?”

“No, I’m just leaving to go get a pet: a creature that will be completely dependent on my family for its food and its shelter.”

“Fine, then: You’re just leaving to go get a pet?”

“That idea really disturbs you, doesn’t it?”

“It’s just… weird.”

“Would it make the Puritan inside you more content if I got the dog later today?”

“Yes!”

Keenan was surprised at the enthusiasm in Paige’s voice. Apparently, she’d never seen a client excuse himself from a meeting with her to go get a dog.

“Okay, then. I’ll tell Randy we’re getting the dog later-her schedule permitting.”

“And then you’ll come back here?”

“No. I have plenty of other things to do. We have a Granola Girl on Howard Stern next week, and I want to make sure she knows what she’s in for-and that she doesn’t have to take her top off, no matter how many goldfish he threatens to kill if she doesn’t. And Joan’s ‘Don’t Gobble the Gobbler’ campaign needs a little work: It sounds like we disapprove of Thanksgiving, and not just eating turkey. And Dominique’s holiday fund-raising letter is pretty extreme. And you know what? Even if none of the projects on my list interests me this morning, I think I could entertain myself just fine by screwing around with my new left-handed keyboard and mouse.” When he was finished speaking he gave them a small wave and started down the corridor to his office.

After a moment Paige asked, her voice barely above a whisper, “Do you think he’s stable? He just went from a near stupor to this zeal for some dog.”

“It’s for his daughter. The dog. It’s a belated birthday present.”

“Keenan?”

“Yes?”

“I’m worried about him. I’m worried about his health.”

“You?”

“I know. I’m not just worried about his behavior at the press conference. I’m worried about whatever’s going on inside his head. He really does seem…”

“Different.”

“Uh-huh. Whatever happens, we have to make sure that we get a decent settlement out of Adirondack. He-his family-might really need one.”

“Well, then. Let us be certain we do two things. Let us make it absolutely clear at the press conference next Tuesday that Spencer’s lawsuit in no way rests on a malfunctioning firearm: We must say crisply and without reservation that the gun worked exactly as Adirondack designed it. Second, let us be certain that we have an explanation for John Seton’s inability to extricate that final cartridge from the chamber. Are we in agreement?”

She inhaled deeply, and he thought he detected a slight shudder of real humanity inside the fortress she built from René Lezard pinstripes and a coiffure from Richard Stein.

“We are,” she said, and he allowed himself a small smile.

SHE TALKED ABOUT BREARLEY and the musical she was going to be in, and she talked about being a single child. She sank deep into the cushions of the easy chair opposite Dr. Warwick and told her what she liked about her summers in New Hampshire and what she found burdensome and boring. She began with short answers, not because she was trying to be difficult but because there were moments when she honestly wasn’t sure what the correct responses were. The truth was that it never had been a big deal to have her mom in the school building with her, and more times than not she actually enjoyed the sensation. But her aunt Sara once told her how much she had disliked being the school secretary’s kid when she’d been growing up, and so Charlotte found herself wondering now what it meant that she wasn’t disturbed by the fact her mom taught at Brearley.

Likewise, she certainly had tried to find excuses not to work in her dad’s vegetable garden this summer (and everyone did seem to view it as Dad’s Vegetable Garden), but if she revealed this to her psychiatrist, would the woman presume she was so angry with her dad on a subconscious level that she’d shot him on purpose just so she could escape a little weeding? That was ridiculous. But she’d heard enough from her New York friends who were in therapy to know that grown-ups seemed to love to blame the subconscious and were thrilled when it could take the fall for their kids’ misbehavior.

And, she had to admit, she had no idea herself just how murky her subconscious might be when it came to her dad. Who could say what sort of ooze was deep in there, what kind of roiling animosity was festering in the gray matter behind her eyes? She loved the way he was there for her now-this week, this month-but this serious interest in her life was a new phenomenon.

No doubt about it: This conversation was a tightrope. She thought she had managed to keep her balance so far. Thank God, Dr. Warwick hadn’t ushered her over to the corner of the room with the dolls and the blocks and the trucks and subjected her to toy therapy. If this nightmare had occurred two or three years earlier, Charlotte guessed, she and the shrink might be on the floor right now dressing Barbies.

“Do you want to talk about what happened in New Hampshire?” the doctor was asking. Her voice was silken, soft. It reminded her of a female hypnotist she had once seen interviewed on the Discovery Channel.

“Sure.”

“Do you think about it often?”

“Every time I see my dad I think about it.”

“Because of his sling?”

“And his beard.”

“He didn’t use to have a beard?”

“No. It’s really hard for him to shave now, so he just stopped. His beard isn’t in all the way yet. But it’s getting there. It’s mostly black, but it’s got some white and some red in it, too. The red is really surprising, because he doesn’t have any red in his hair.”

“What do you think about when you see him?”

She considered this for a moment and didn’t say a word. Unlike many adults, silence didn’t seem to disturb Dr. Warwick. She just sat there and waited.

“Well, I think about how much he must hurt,” she said finally, both because she did think about the pain he was enduring and because this response seemed appropriate. She guessed it was what she was supposed to say.

“What else?”

“I think about how his life has changed. All the stuff he can’t do.”

“Is there a lot?”

“Oh, yeah. Tons. He’s right-handed. He can barely open a bottle of ketchup these days.”

The doctor rested her chin in her hand and smiled. Charlotte suddenly detected a trace of perfume and she recognized it from… from New Hampshire. It wasn’t a perfume that her mother or her aunt or Grandmother wore, that wasn’t why it was familiar. Rather, it was an aroma that reminded her of one of the flowers in the cutting garden they’d put in. The tall purple ones, she guessed, but she wasn’t positive. She wished she knew the plant’s name.

“Has that changed your relationship with him?”

“The fact he can’t open a bottle of ketchup?”

“That’s right.”

She shrugged. “Sure. I do a lot of stuff for him I never did before-stuff he would never have let me do before. At first, he thought he was going to be superindependent-despite the injury. Then he figured out he didn’t have a prayer. And so I tie his sneakers for him. I make his coffee for him. I don’t do the real personal stuff, like flossing his teeth and helping him get dressed and undressed. Mom does that. When he burnt the crap-excuse me-when he burnt the heck out of his hand, she was the one who kept putting the lotion on it. But I always feed the cats now-which is a real production, because of course we’re not a normal family that feeds the cats normal canned cat food. That has meat in it, so we can’t. It used to be that whoever happened to be in the kitchen would feed the kitties, but now it’s always Mom or me. And because Mom is so busy making sure that Dad’s zipper is up or something, I try to be the one to feed them. And that means getting down the vegan vegetable stew, the Foney Baloney, the seitan, and the vitamin supplements and then mixing them all together. And our cats are so finicky, we can’t mix up a huge batch ahead of time and then store it in the refrigerator. It has to be room temperature, which means opening a fresh can of the stew each and every time and then mushing in the other ingredients, including the Foney Baloney which does have to be refrigerated and so it really has to be blended into the canned stuff. It is only completely impossible to do it all with one hand. Mom just wants to start buying them Friskies or something to make our lives a little easier, but I know that isn’t what Dad wants, and so I figure I better be the cat chef for now.”