Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online

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.
    “What’s in the paper?” he asked.
    “Dickie Ames was busted last night. It was another DUI—”
    “Oh, Jesus, he didn’t hurt anyone, did he?”
    “No. But he took out a fire hydrant. And because it was the zillionth time—”
    “It was not the zillionth time,” John corrected her. Sally was an excellent secretary, but she was twenty-three and her tendency to speak with adolescent hyperbole sometimes annoyed him. “It was, I believe, the third.”
    “Well, he blew a mighty impressive point-one. And, oh by the way, he was driving with a suspended license: He wasn’t due to get it back until the week after next.”
    John wasn’t defending Dickie Ames, but he needed the man to be a credible witness in a misdemeanor assault in a bar. Ames was a drinking and deer-hunting pal of Andre Nadeau and was supposed to explain to the judge at a bail review on Monday that Nadeau was acting in self-defense when he’d broken a heavy glass beer mug against the side of Cameron Gerrity’s face in a fight—which, John believed, was exactly the truth. It
was
self-defense. Gerrity may have been the one to wind up with the thirty-four stitches in his cheek and a nose that would look forever like a boxer’s, but John was quite confident that Nadeau had been provoked. Ames saw it all and he said so. Besides, there were extenuating circumstances John hoped the judge would consider. Nadeau was a single dad. John had seen him with his boys, and although Nadeau may have had a problem with drinking (yes, like his pal, Dickie Ames) he certainly didn’t have one with aggression. He had no history of pummeling people in bars. He had no history of pummeling people anywhere.
    If given the chance, Dickie Ames was also going to tell the judge what a fine father Nadeau was to those two boys and that whenever he had been together with the family at deer camp, the man was loving, gentle, and preternaturally responsible—especially when it came to teaching a couple of junior high school kids not to kill themselves with the family arsenal the grown men used to kill deer and moose and bears and any other mammals they happened to stumble across in the woods. John liked Nadeau—and not simply in the protective, fatherly way he liked all the pathetic drinkers and substance abusers and petty thieves who wound up at the office of the