Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“Very nice.”

“What are you working on?”

“A bit of everything. Thanksgiving. Our holiday fund-raising pitch…”

“Well, if there is anything I can do to help, you’ll let me know?”

“I always do.”

She smiled and continued down the hall. He had the sense that there was something more to Dominique’s conversation with Nan Seton, and either the woman honestly couldn’t remember or didn’t want to burden him with the specifics. Or, maybe, she just didn’t want to tell him. He guessed if it was important he’d find out eventually, and so he returned to the pages with the recipe ideas for vegetarian Thanksgiving celebrations that Joan Robbins wanted to pitch to a variety of daily newspapers. Most of them focused way too much on tofu and squash for the mainstream media. But there were a few ideas with potential, especially her lists of halftime snacks for the football-watching crowd that were free of animals and animal-sourced products-and could be found in any local supermarket. It was the second element that made it so clever in Spencer’s opinion. If you had any hope at all of keeping the average American away from the sour cream dips and Buffalo chicken wings, you had to make sure your alternatives were no more than an aisle or two away from the Budweiser and didn’t demand a special trip to the natural foods grocery store.

He had just verbalized a few suggestions for Joan into his brand-new digital recorder, when he saw that Randy was waiting for him in his doorway. The young woman was wearing a white linen broomstick skirt that fell to her ankles and a red drawstring blouse with the ties so loose he could see the front clasp of her lilac bra. Reflexively, he averted his eyes. Sometimes the part of the woman that had aspired to be a fashion model-that exuberant exhibitionist who had been so comfortable as a nearly naked FERAL Granola Girl-still dressed like a catalog tart. It was a tendency, Spencer knew, that served her well when she was working the male contingent of the press face to face.

“Ready to become a doggie daddy?” she asked.

“Yes, indeed,” he said. He rose, surprised by the sharp ache he felt in his left wrist, and he wondered if he had overworked his left hand and arm today with his physical therapist. Fortunately, it only seemed to hurt when he bent it, and so he didn’t anticipate any problems bringing their new dog across town. He glanced at his watch. It was barely twenty past three. Catherine and Charlotte were still at school, and would be for another two hours because rehearsals this week were lasting till almost five thirty. Assuming there were no last-minute hitches at the shelter, he and Tanya would be waiting to surprise them in the living room when they walked in the front door.

THE PLAN WAS SIMPLE, especially since they would be taking a taxi from the humane society to the apartment. Spencer would walk the dog to and from the cab, and Randy would carry the paperwork, the ratty pillow Tanya loved, and the goody bag with plastic dog toys the shelter was giving them.

Unfortunately, Tanya wasn’t real happy about the serpentine cab ride through Central Park. Twice she fell against Spencer in such a fashion that the first time he fell forward and cut the palm of his left hand against a jagged edge of the half-open ashtray that was built into the back of the front passenger seat, and the second time he bounced against his right shoulder and cried out in agony-which, in turn, caused the poor dog to dive onto the floor of the cab where she cowered for the remainder of the ride. By the time they arrived at West Eighty-fifth Street, his pants were speckled with drops of his blood, he was on the verge of vomiting in the back of a New York City cab for the second time in the month, and the dog was whimpering at his feet.

Then when Spencer pushed open the door with his left hand, the leash wrapped carefully around his wrist, Tanya made a sudden leap for daylight. Spencer had no right arm to brace his fall, and so he was pulled down onto his knees on the sidewalk, his shins cracking so hard into the curb by the cab that he feared for an instant he’d broken both his legs. Still, even that pain was nothing compared to the excruciating, lights-flickering torture he was experiencing in his shoulder as a result of falling atop his right arm.

“Fuck!” he hissed into the pavement. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He rarely swore, but this seemed an occasion on which it made little sense to bother stifling a profound and much needed desire to vent. The only good news was that he had managed to hang on to the leash, and so Tanya-though straining hard-was still with them. He had a vision of her racing down the sidewalk, dragging her leash, until someone or something spooked her and she ran into the street, where a delivery truck slammed into her and sent her cartwheeling through the air to her death.

Randy raced around the other side of the cab and knelt before the dog, stroking her behind her ears and murmuring that she was okay, she was going to love her new home, and she wouldn’t have to ride in any big, bad cars for a long, long time. She didn’t, he noticed, make any effort to see if he, too, was going to be all right, but he guessed that an animal was always going to get more sympathy than a human from Randy Mitchell. She did, after all, work for FERAL.

He slowly climbed up onto his knees, glancing briefly at the dirt and tiny pebbles that were lodged in the stinging cuts in his hand, and turned back toward the taxi. The driver had emerged from the vehicle, and for a moment Spencer was touched: The fellow apparently wanted to see if he was okay, and he felt a small, grateful smile forming on his lips.

“Eight seventy-five,” the cabbie said, his voice not exactly menacing, but a far cry from compassionate. “One of you two owes me eight dollars and seventy-five cents.”

Randy put down the pillow and the papers from the shelter and started to rummage inside her purse, and Spencer was about to stop her. But then he stopped himself. He couldn’t imagine how he could possibly reach into his pocket for his wallet with a dog’s leash wrapped around his one good wrist and his one good hand a bloody mess, while every cell in his shoulder and his shins and his left palm was screaming for mercy. And so he just turned from the cold eyes of the cabdriver to the confused and frightened ones of his dog and tried to compose himself. He could pay Randy back upstairs. She could wash out his hand for him, and-though it would incapacitate him further-cover the gashes and little cuts with gauze. He could change his pants, time-consuming as that little act might be. Or not. These khakis were goners already, so he probably wouldn’t bother. Either way, soon he would be inside his home with this dog, a gift for his daughter, and he would fix himself a gin and tonic and Percocet. And then everything would be fine.

Or, at least, as fine as things got these days.

Sara watched Nan serving the plump chicken breasts and the rice, and spooning the boiled peas and carrots from a gold-rimmed china bowl that had probably been in the family since the turn of the twentieth century. She envisioned Nan’s grandmother as a young bride ladling creamed onions from it when Theodore Roosevelt had been president.

Nan liked to sit at the head of the long cherry table, surrounded by the different components of the meal: the meat, two vegetables, and the starch. She would have the assembled family pass their plates to her one by one, the farthest from her first, and so she was always serving herself last. It was a small ballet.

The New York table was set tonight with the usual elegance-and it was indeed a dramatically different presentation from the chaos that often reigned in New Hampshire-despite the fact that the only guests were her son and his family from Vermont. Everyone but Patrick had two pieces of Waterford crystal before them, a claret wine goblet and a water glass, each with a series of wedge-cut sparkles that resembled a castle’s turret. There was sufficient silverware (and it was indeed silver, not stainless steel) bordering the linen place mats to exasperate poor Willow (why Grandmother wanted them each to have two sizes of each utensil was a frequent source of conversation on the drives back to Vermont), and they all had cloth napkins rolled neatly inside personally monogrammed silver rings. Even Patrick had a napkin ring now with his initials.