Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“Spencer is not going to join you tomorrow,” Nan was saying. “I don’t know what his plans are exactly, but Catherine said he’s not going to the Cloisters.”

“Yes, she told me he’ll be at his office,” John said.

“He’s being quite pigheaded,” Nan continued, her exasperation evident in even the set of her mouth.

“He’s angry,” Sara said, offering Patrick some applesauce. “And he believes he’s punishing John.”

“He’s punishing the whole family. Think of how much fun you’d have at that festival tomorrow if you were all there together-like the old days!”

“Mother, Spencer was never the life of the party!”

“No,” Nan said, “of course he wasn’t. But his absence will be a damper, precisely because we will all know why he’s not there. And the same goes for this Sunday. I want to take my granddaughters someplace special for their birthdays, and this… spat-”

“Call it a feud,” John said, his voice edged with sardonic resignation. “This constitutes a feud, not a spat.”

“Fine, then. This feud is complicating everything. What is Spencer going to do, mope the whole time you’re here?”

“He’ll be working, Mother. It’s how he deals with adversity. He’ll do whatever it is that he can right now, whether it’s writing a speech or telling the French not to eat foie gras or planning that nightmarish press conference,” John said.

“Dad?” It was Willow.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“You’re not going to the press conference because it’s not till Tuesday. Right?”

“I’m not going to the press conference because I don’t want to be there. Even if we happened to be in town for some reason, I wouldn’t be going. You don’t actually want to go, do you?”

“You will most assuredly not be at that press conference,” Nan said to her granddaughter. “And neither will your cousin.”

“No, Nan, of course they won’t,” Sara told her mother-in-law.

“And I don’t want to go,” Willow said. “I was just wondering: Will the people at the press conference have to take an oath?”

Sara studied her daughter intently. Though the child was only a week and a half shy of eleven, she looked tiny. Small, petite. A pipsqueak. She was smart and she was articulate and she was wise beyond her years… but she was still a pipsqueak.

“No,” John said, answering slowly and carefully, “they won’t. The press conference is not simply to announce that your uncle is suing a gun company. It’s also about propaganda. Your uncle and whomever else FERAL has up there won’t be lying, but they are going to offer an extremely selective compilation of the facts. It’s very different from a deposition. I certainly don’t want to romanticize the law, but the purpose of a deposition is to reconstruct history and learn as precisely as we can what actually occurred.”

“Which is why they make you take an oath,” Willow murmured. She picked up the bigger of her two forks, and started pushing the rice around on her plate.

“Which is why they make you take an oath,” her husband repeated abstractedly. He seemed only to have half-heard the melancholy in their daughter’s voice. Sara wondered what he was thinking-what both her husband and her daughter were thinking-but sensed that she shouldn’t ask either right now.

CATHERINE STOOD for a long moment, the plastic bags full of groceries dangling like weights at the ends of both of her arms. She watched her daughter drop her knapsack and the grocery bag she was carrying onto the rug just inside the front door and run across the living room toward her father. He looked insane right now, a complete madman. His hair was a mess, there were bloodstains all over the legs of his trousers, and his one good hand was swaddled in white hospital tape and gauze. But he was sitting serenely in the easy chair by the fireplace as if he were hosting Masterpiece Theatre, his legs crossed, cradling a drink in his working fingers. And perched attentively by his feet was a dog, an animal that looked a bit like a collie but was considerably smaller. It started to shrink at Charlotte’s imminent approach, but then it figured out this human meant it no harm and began to sniff the child energetically. Then it started to lick Charlotte’s face, practically painting her cheeks with its tongue.

Though a small part of Catherine was holding out the feeble hope that the animal belonged to someone at FERAL and it was only going to be a weekend guest at their home-though even that would have demonstrated, in her opinion, a colossal indifference on her husband’s part to the amount of work she already was doing as well as to the feelings of their two cats-she knew instinctively that this was supposed to be a keeper. And so despite the reality that she understood she was about to say exactly the wrong thing, she put down her plastic bags beside the one Charlotte had been carting and said, her voice a robust combination of pique and disgust, “Where are the cats?”

“And good evening to you, too. Welcome home.” He raised his glass in a mock toast.

She saw then that the doorway that led down the hall to their bedrooms was closed. “Are they in our room?” she asked.

“They are.”

“What’s her name?” Charlotte was asking, the three short syllables merged into one blissful cry. “Does she have one yet? How old is she?”

“Her name is Tanya, and she’s two. I got her at the humane society.” He put his glass down on the side table, the tumbler balanced precariously on the coaster because he had failed to center it atop the small wicker mat. Then he labored to his feet, his bandaged palm pressing hard against the armrest of the chair. “She’s very good with cats,” he said, directing this last statement at his wife. “I watched her with some.”

“That may be,” Catherine said, “but our cats are not necessarily very good with dogs. And they were here first.”

“They’ll be okay.”

“Are we keeping her?” Charlotte asked, though it was hard to understand precisely what she had said because her face was buried in the thick ruffles of fur that surrounded the dog’s collar and neck.

“Yes, of course, we are. Happy birthday.”

“She’s a birthday present?” the girl asked.

“A belated one, yes. I was going to bring her home next week, but then I decided a Friday was best because this way you can spend more time with her. You won’t have to desert her first thing in the morning for school, and you won’t be gone until nearly dinner with rehearsals.”

“Spencer?”

“Catherine?”

“This weekend will be no better than next week-at least in terms of time. My brother and his family are coming for a visit. Remember? And while you seem to have no interest in seeing them-”

“I can’t wait to see Sara and my beautiful niece.”

“Fine. My point is that Charlotte is up at the Cloisters and Fort Tryon tomorrow, and my mother is taking the girls to brunch on Sunday, and I’m sure we’ll all want to do something tomorrow night. And so I don’t know when you think we’re going to have the time to bond with this-”

“This weekend. We’ll bond this weekend. And next week. And throughout what’s left of September and October. We’ll be fine. It won’t happen overnight. Never does. But, as you can see”-he motioned down at their daughter and the dog-“the two of them seem to be getting along just fine.”

“Is she house-trained?”

“She is.”

“And who’s going to walk her? And feed her? Did you think for one moment about how much work an animal is? How much work it will be for me?”

“No,” he said evenly, “I don’t think much about animals and their care.”

“Spencer!”

“Lighten up, will you? Look, I can walk her-”