Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online Page B

years that it dawned on Sara why she might be allowed to refer to her mother-in-law as Nan and Spencer was not: Perhaps it made Nan feel younger—as if the two of them were girlfriends—if they called each other by their first names.
    As she and John and their baby drove now to New Hampshire, Sara decided that although she wasn’t dreading the weekend before her, she wasn’t looking forward to it, either. She was beginning to feel that her own house was getting back into some kind of order for the first time since before Patrick was born and she would have enjoyed a weekend at home. Moreover, the child was cutting a tooth—though he was sleeping right now in his infant car seat in the back—and poor John was exhausted. Could barely keep his eyes open at the dinner table last night and had spent most of the morning lying on the floor with the baby.
    She was also troubled by the sheer amount she had felt compelled to pack. They’d be in New Hampshire a whopping sixty-eight to seventy hours, but between the excessive athleticism her mother-in-law cheerfully inflicted on the family (she had to remember tennis rackets and golf clubs and bathing suits, though she wanted to play neither golf nor tennis nor swim in that frigid alpine slush that Nan called a lake or that club pool that reeked of chlorine) and the accrual of health and beauty aids—sunscreens and powders and shampoos and lotions and teething gel and ointment and hair glitter and, alas, even lipstick for Willow because Nan had them all going to the club on Saturday night for a soiree of some sort and Willow had said on the phone that Charlotte would be wearing lipstick and so she wanted to wear some now, too—it felt to her as if she were packing for a monthlong expedition into a lost world without drugstores and shopping malls.
    She thought she might be overthinking this because she was a therapist, but the problem with Nan—and with John and Catherine and, yes, Spencer when they were all together—was that they could never just . . . be. They didn’t sit still well as a family. When she and John had been younger they’d smoked a little dope, and sometimes she longed to buy a bag of the most mellow stuff she could find and bring it with her to Sugar Hill. Sedate the whole bunch of them so they’d all sit on that wraparound porch and just stare at the beauty of the lupine. Maybe open the windows, point the speakers outside, and listen to music on that antique record player Nan kept in the living room. Play some of those old Sammy Davis Jr. and Mel Tormé albums that her daughter had presumed were oddly flat Frisbees when she’d been a first-grader.
    Her daughter. Now, that was the part of the weekend that excited her. Though she spoke with Willow on the phone at least every other night, she hadn’t seen her in just about two weeks now—twelve days to be precise—and she missed almost every aspect of having the girl in her life on a daily basis. She missed reading to the child in bed in the evenings or having the child read to her; she missed the way Willow moved slowly through the house with the grace of a ballet dancer, sometimes seeming to barely touch the stairs when she glided down them on her bare feet; she missed the way the girl managed somehow to eat cereal without making a sound—the spoon never touched the sides of the bowl, and Willow seemed to loathe the insectival sound of a slurp as much as any grown-up—and she missed the way Willow could calm Patrick with an almost paranormal gentleness. When the baby was in nuclear meltdown and neither breast milk nor rocking would silence the child’s earsplitting siren of a shriek, somehow Willow knew precisely how to hold him or tickle him or rub him to bring both parents and newborn back from the brink. She also changed diapers, which certainly made things easier when Sara was trying to get something that resembled dinner on the table.
    Willow was not a perfect child, of course, and Sara did