Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“Absolutely. Ask me anything.”

“How much weight have you lost? You look like hell.”

“I don’t know. Ten, maybe fifteen pounds.”

“That’s impressive. All since mid-August?”

The man shrugged with both shoulders, a motion Spencer noticed largely because he couldn’t do it. “Early August, mid-August. I don’t know.”

“Why are you on a diet?”

“I’m not. I’m just not hungry.”

“Well, the two of us look pretty scary.”

“I know. I saw in the paper today that there’s a play opening downtown about the Bataan Death March. We should have auditioned.”

He grinned in spite of himself. “I’m amazed I’m not losing more weight. I spill more food than I get to my mouth. At breakfast this morning I overturned a bowlful of cereal. Sent the whole thing somersaulting onto the floor. Fortunately, Tanya was right there. To be honest, that’s the main reason I got the dog. It wasn’t for Charlotte. It was for me. She’ll eat anything.”

“Even soy milk?”

“Oh, yeah. I checked her references. I made sure she was a vegan.”

“Really?”

“I’m kidding. The animal shelter doesn’t categorize its animals that way.”

“But you will try to make her a vegetarian-like your cats. True?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I may even pick up a few cans of Friskies for the cats one of these days. Just leave them on the kitchen counter for Catherine and Charlotte to discover one evening when they go to feed them. Everything is so much harder now, and not just for me. Sometimes I need to give in and accept the fact that I can’t do as much as I’d like.”

“You’re getting mellow in your old age.”

“You learn to compromise when you’re down to one arm. And the truth is, Catherine eats meat-did you know that?”

“She told me a few weeks ago.”

“Yup: My wife eats meat and the sun continues to rise.”

They were quiet for a moment. The garden was starting to empty, and he wondered if something special was about to occur in the park. The jousting, maybe. That would explain why people were beginning to leave.

“Spencer?”

“Yes?”

“I was thinking of staying in town for the press conference.”

“That would be interesting. Did you discuss this with Paige?”

“I’m not going to stick around. At least I don’t think I will. And I wouldn’t have been staying to help you. I was going to threaten to stay-threaten to talk about the benefits of hunting-to try to convince you not to announce your lawsuit with a press conference. It was a stupid idea. And I’m only telling you now so you understand the depth of my concern. I mean, I have no objections to the lawsuit itself. Absolutely none…”

Spencer circled his left index finger at John, signaling him to continue.

“But if I were at the press conference,” John said, “a lot of reporters would want to talk to me. It would be chaos. And, in the end, less time and space would be devoted to the FERAL message, because the writers and producers would have the chance to quote me-the guy who owned the gun. And I would talk very reasonably about managing the size of the deer herd through hunting, and how contraception only works in very controlled little worlds. But it was all just brinkmanship. Public relations brinkmanship. I couldn’t have gone through with it.”

He thought about this, picturing John in the rear of that large conference room in Paige’s firm where they were going to announce the lawsuit, and the vision didn’t make him angry. Certainly it would have once. Mostly, he guessed, he was surprised that John-exactly like his sister-had so little faith in what he was going to do at the event, in what he was going to say.

“You sound like Catherine,” he said after a moment.

“Was she threatening to go, too?”

“No. It’s that both of you seem to think I am going to mismanage the press conference, and my daughter is going to be humiliated. That’s not going to happen. I know what I’m doing.”

“I won’t ask what your plans are, but…”

“Good,” he said, “it’s too nice a day and it’s too good to see you again.” He reached into his left pants pocket for one of the Percocet he carried there loosely like change and popped it into his mouth without water. When he had swallowed it he continued, “Seriously, John, you can sleep easy. I know what I’m doing, and I would never embarrass my daughter. Now, shall we rejoin our families and see if the jousting is about to begin?”

A MAGICIAN dressed up like Merlin was throwing bolts of fire into the autumn air from his fingertips, while a group of costumed adults were performing a living chess match on the tournament field. Willow decided that her art teacher, Grace Seeley, had been correct: This festival was wonderful. She had to remind herself that the whole reason she was here was to talk to her cousin about their depositions, a conversation toward which she had made no overtures thus far. Mostly they had discussed the school musical in which Charlotte had a lead and her cousin’s new dog. When she put the two subjects together, it almost made Willow breathless with envy: How interesting her New York City cousin’s life was compared to hers!

They were walking alone now, a dozen yards ahead of their mothers, their grandmother, and Patrick, when Charlotte surprised her by saying, “Are you still worried about those oaths we may have to take?”

“Yes.” She considered adding more, but since her cousin had brought this up she had the instinctive sense that she should remain patient and see what Charlotte had to say.

“I’ve been thinking about them, too.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. And I know you don’t want us to lie, but I believe we have to. We have to for my father. This whole lawsuit could crash and burn-isn’t that a powerful expression? I learned it from my history teacher-if people find out I was stoned when I pulled the trigger. And that would be a disaster for him both personally and professionally. This isn’t about you or me, and it sure as heck isn’t about Gwen. It’s about my dad. Your uncle.”

She worked hard not to raise her voice. “But what about my dad? It isn’t fair to him if we don’t tell the truth-”

“Your dad isn’t crippled. Mine is. Your dad doesn’t have a cause here that matters to him. Mine does.”

“But lying is wrong. It’s-”

“Willow, have you ever told someone you couldn’t come over to their house because you were going to visit your grandmother? You know, told a little white lie so you didn’t hurt someone’s feelings? In my opinion, not telling the whole truth at the depo-whatever-”

“Deposition,” she said, unable to restrain herself from correcting her cousin.

“Right. Deposition. Not telling the truth at the deposition is like a white lie. It makes things better than telling the truth, which would only make people’s lives worse. Do you see the difference?”

“We’re not talking about a little white lie. We’re talking about a really big one.”

“No. The point is-”

“Here’s what I think the point is. Your dad can’t use his arm anymore and my dad is in trouble because you picked up his gun and started fooling around with it. And why were you fooling around with it? Because we were both stoned.”

“First of all, your dad is not in trouble. Second, I would have taken the gun even if we hadn’t been smoking pot,” she said evenly, her voice lowering a register and picking up a slight trace of a British accent. “That’s my point, and I am quite certain of it now.”

“So, you know what’s going to happen, then?” Willow responded, hoping to keep her tone equally as measured. She stared straight ahead at the chess players in their medieval garb, wondering suddenly where they’d gotten all those costumes. Everyone looked like they had just arrived here from Middle Earth. “You won’t say anything about the pot and the beer, but I will. They’ll find out anyway-everyone will-and that certainly won’t make your dad’s case look very good.”