Before You Know Kindness

  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 not for a moment delude herself into believing that she was. She gave up quickly on math problems, it was easier to pull the witchgrass from the front garden than it was to convince her to clean her room or put her dirty clothes in the hamper, and she spent more time in front of a mirror than Sara thought any ten-year-old should. But she was sweet and sensitive and Sara loved her madly--so much more, she feared on occasion, than she would ever learn to love her baby boy with his tendency to pee straight into the air like a geyser.

  "Did we remember the nightlight?" John was asking her now.

  "Darn it, we didn't," she said. She honestly didn't know how much Patrick needed the nightlight, but his parents sure did. It was bad enough to be awake at one or two in the morning, but it was hell when you slammed your shin into the crib, or nearly poked out an eye on one of the airplane wings in the mobile that dangled just beyond the lad's reach.

  "Well, we can pick one up in Littleton."

  "That means getting off the highway," she said, an issue in her mind only because getting off the highway would slow them down and thereby decrease their chances of getting to the club in time for lunch.

  "Maybe I can get one this afternoon, then," John said. "I'll be happy to pick one up while Patrick's napping. I'll want to get a new can of tennis balls, anyway. You know the ones Mother has are going to be so old they'll bounce like rocks."

  She nodded and glanced back at Patrick, resisting the urge to squeeze his toes in his socks. Then she closed her eyes, flexed her own toes once against the straps of her sandals, and started to make an inventory in her mind of everything she had packed and John had wedged into the backseat and the trunk of the Volvo. She was asleep before she had even finished with the items in the diaper bag resting now beside the baby behind her.

  Chapter Four.

  Willow Seton curled her legs up against her chest, and wrapped her thin arms around her thin knees. She was sitting on the coralline cement that surrounded the club's swimming pool, and she could feel the pebbly stone surface through the blue Lycra of her Speedo tank suit. It was late morning, and with the exception of the two cousins, the lifeguard, and a pair of older women in pastel tennis skirts chatting near the diving board, the pool area was empty. Overhead there were a few dolloplike scoops of cumulus clouds, phosphorescent in the high summer sky, and when they passed between the sun and the earth Willow would pull her body into an even tighter ball.

  She found herself scrutinizing Charlotte as her cousin draped her body languidly in the water atop three long, Styrofoam floating noodles: a hot pink one in the hollow behind her knees, a banana yellow one beneath the small of her back, and a red one that looked like a long piece of licorice behind her neck. She was wearing the black string bikini that drove their grandmother crazy. But their grandmother was taking a golf lesson right now and so Charlotte had raced directly into the ladies' cabana and changed from her tennis clothes into the bathing suit. Now she had the pool to herself, and she was acting as if she were completely unaware that her cousin and the lifeguard were watching her.

  At least Willow presumed Charlotte thought the lifeguard was watching her: Charlotte seemed to believe that teenage boys always were watching her. In this case, however, Willow honestly didn't believe that Gary was aware of her cousin as anything more than a girl who swam well enough that it was unlikely she would find a way to drown herself on his watch. The fact was, Charlotte was twelve, a child like herself. Sure, she'd turn thirteen in the last week in August, a month before Willow would reach eleven, but Charlotte hadn't even started eighth grade yet. Gary, both cousins knew, had graduated from high school that June.

  Still, Charlotte was a beautiful girl, and for the past two weeks she had managed to convince their grandmother that she was wearing sunblock when in reality she wasn't: Though this might mean she'd have to battle all kinds of skin cancers in that never-never land of adulthood, right now her skin was bronzed to the point of exoticism, and she was going to show off every single inch that she could.

  By comparison, Willow felt like a jar of old craft paste: pale white because she had been wearing the requisite sunscreen, tired, and common. Even her bathing suit looked unattractive: The bottom had started to pill from all the hours she'd spent sitting on the cement around the pool. Until this week, it hadn't even crossed her mind that a Speedo could pill. She'd wanted to buy a new suit before her parents brought her here for the month, but because of baby Patrick there hadn't been time to go to the mall.

  "I think I should pierce my belly button," Charlotte said abruptly, and though Willow was aware that the remark technically was directed at her, she knew her cousin had only broached the idea to get a reaction out of Gary. "I think I should get a silver ring. Don't you?"

  "No."

  "You don't think I'd look good with one?"

  "I think your mom and dad would kill you."

  "They wouldn't know. It's not like I walk around in a halter at home."

  "Well, it's not like you do at school, either. So why do it?"

  "It would be cool."

  "You couldn't wear that bathing suit," Willow said, and for a moment it seemed that Charlotte was pondering this, but then the girl glanced out of the corners of her eyes at Gary--Gary with the peeling skin on his nose and the tawny young man's hair on his chest, Gary with the sunglasses and the whistle and the small stud of his own sparkling right now in his left ear--and she realized that Charlotte was thrilled that she had alluded to how scanty her bathing suit was in front of the lifeguard.

  "That would be too bad, wouldn't it?" Charlotte said. "Maybe I'll wait till the end of the summer. When we go home. I'll bet this town doesn't even have a place that does body art."

  "No," Gary said from the top of the chair, the sound of his voice--and the reality that he was actually listening to their conversation--catching them both by surprise. "There isn't a place in Franconia or Sugar Hill. But you could always try Yankee Art up in Littleton. The guy there also does tattoos."

  "Yeah, Charlotte, why don't you get a tattoo? A belly-button ring and a tattoo. That'll make your mom and dad real happy."

  "Of course," Gary continued, "you'll need to wait at least five or six years. I'm pretty sure it's against the law to tattoo a seventh-grader." He was smiling when he said it, and Willow wished she could see his eyes behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.

  "Eighth," Charlotte said, almost spitting the syllable up at him. "I'll be in eighth grade in September."

  The lifeguard just nodded, and Willow could tell he was struggling not to laugh. Then she saw him look up at something behind her, and when she turned she saw her mom and dad and Patrick--the baby in a Snugli on her father's chest, his small pink hands the only visible flesh--wandering toward them across the grass between the main entrance and the club
house with its picture-window views of Mount Lafayette. They were early, she realized, because Grandmother had said they probably wouldn't arrive until midafternoon. Then her mom was opening the gate in the chain-link fence that surrounded the pool, and--forgetting completely for the moment that her cousin Charlotte was annoyed by enthusiasm in any form--Willow was on her feet and running across the cement deck toward them because the truth was that she missed her parents, even if they hadn't found the time to buy her a new bathing suit, and she was very glad they were here.

  WILLOW BOUNCED her baby brother on her lap in a wrought-iron chair on the clubhouse deck by the dining room. His eyes reminded her of the pearly blue moonstones on the necklace Grandmother had given her for Christmas seven months ago, and his hair looked a bit like a baby chick's. She had already finished her grilled cheese, but everyone else was still eating--except for Charlotte, who had never gotten to join them because Grandmother had refused to allow her to leave the pool area until she put on a T-shirt and shorts, and so the girl had been left to pout in the ladies' cabana. Had been inside there at least half an hour now. It crossed Willow's mind that it was possible Charlotte had snuck out and was actually watching the older teenagers sunbathe on the grassy hill just behind the tennis courts--she was probably sunbathing with those older kids, in fact--but she certainly wasn't going to squeal on her cousin.

  Her parents and her grandmother were talking about a funeral Grandmother was going to attend tomorrow for Walter Durnip. Willow knew Mr. Durnip largely as a heavyset man who seemed to walk in slow motion back and forth along the first hole of the golf course, but as far as Willow could tell he never played. He wore Bermuda shorts, and he had veins on his legs that looked like the topographic relief map in her classroom of the rivers in the Amazon rain forest. Her dad seemed a little sad that Mr. Durnip was dead. Apparently he had known the man his whole life, and the man's daughter had babysat him when he was a little boy.

  "Maybe I'll join you, Mother," her father said, referring to the funeral. Both he and her mother were eating tomatoes filled with salmon, and Willow found herself wishing the sheer rosiness of the fish had been hidden better by the mayonnaise and the dill. What was it Charlotte was always saying? It's not meat, it's flesh.

  "Oh, don't even think of coming," Grandmother began, shaking her head at her son and groaning. "You're on a weekend vacation. And I just know the funeral is going to be long, and there will be people there who will feel they have the right to talk."

  "It's called a eulogy, Mother. Some people actually like to mourn."

  "I don't mean the minister. I mean regular people. These days, it seems, anyone who happens to be in the church for a funeral is invited to speak. I was at a funeral last summer--that nice Mrs. Knebel--and easily a dozen people thought they had something worth sharing."

  "I gather you thought they were mistaken."

  "That church has very poor ventilation. And they had too many hymns. When I die, I want my funeral to last no more than fifteen minutes, and absolutely no one is allowed to speak but you or your sister, and the minister--whoever it is then. And no hymns. Are we clear?"

  Her father took a long swallow of his iced tea and said, "We're clear, Mother. Show tunes, yes; hymns, no."

  "I'm serious. I want a nice, short funeral--especially if there's sunshine. People should be outdoors."

  Patrick burped and then smiled. His eyes were unblinking.

  "If you die in the summer, we'll be sure to have the funeral here in New Hampshire and we'll be sure to have it outside," her mother said. "We could have it beside the new cutting garden." The cutting garden was a living room-sized block of perennials they had planted between the spindly apple trees and the garage. It actually had been among the easier tasks they had tackled over Memorial Day Weekend, because most of the flowers--the bridal veil astilbe, the red English daisies, the moss pink, the Canada and the Carolina phlox--were in shin-tall buckets and merely needed to be transplanted into the soil that had been tilled before they arrived.

  "If you'd like--and you'll need to let us know ahead of time, Nan--we could even rent a little arch made with lattice from one of those rent-anything places," her mother continued, teasing. Sara was wearing sunglasses and holding her hair back in a tie-dyed scarf Willow had made for her at a summer day camp when she'd been seven. She looked a little bit like that First Lady from the early 1960s Willow had seen photographs of--the one who always seemed to be wearing sunglasses and scarves--except that her mother's hair wasn't quite as dark and her mother as a whole wasn't quite as glamorous.

  Actually, Willow didn't think her mother was glamorous at all. But she was pretty and she was interesting: The girl did not know the details, but she had the sense from the occasional remarks her parents and her Vermont grandparents had made and from pictures she had seen in old photo albums that her mother had been rather wild as a teenager and when she'd been in college. She knew that her mother had once traveled to Cape Cod with a boyfriend on the back of his motorcycle, and that with two of her girlfriends she'd once taken her own father's car and disappeared for a night in Montreal. She had a thin tattoo of what looked to Willow like ivy wrapped around her left ankle, and a rose the size of a tablespoon in the crevice at the very small of her back--a spot no one ever saw these days but Willow, baby Patrick, and John.

  "Oh, I have some bad news about the garden. The vegetable garden," her grandmother was saying.

  "Yes?" Her father used what Willow recognized as his lawyer's tone when he said the word, drawing the single syllable out a long time and keeping his voice perfectly even.

  "Deer. It was attacked by deer last night."

  "Attacked by deer," her mother said, emphasizing attacked. Willow knew that her mother disapproved of language with needlessly violent imagery. "You make it sound like it was shelled."

  "They might as well have shelled it. The peas and string beans and beet greens were eaten, and the corn--"

  "We can't possibly have corn yet," her father said.

  "And the corn plants were trampled. Not all of them. But some."

  "But they didn't eat everything, did they? Not in one visit . . ."

  "No, not everything. But they'll be back."

  She watched her father wipe his lips with his napkin, the cotton cloth already discolored with grease from past swipes. "Spencer will try to stop them--humanely, of course. But he'll do something. That garden means an awful lot to him."

  "I know it does, and for the life of me I don't understand why. He lives six hours away. If he liked gardening so much, he should have had a garden of his own when he lived in Connecticut. He and Catherine should never have moved back into the city if manure and fresh beets--"

  "Endive," her father said. "Endive and kohlrabi . . . and manure."

  "Whatever. If gardening was so important to him, he should have stayed in Long Ridge. Not bought that apartment on Eighty-fifth Street."

  "He tried, Mother. Remember how he lost that garden to the deer, too?"

  "If he couldn't stop them in Connecticut, how in the world will he stop them here?"

  "Maybe he won't," her mother said. "But certainly he'll make the effort. It's not so much about the garden as it is about the house. The property. This place means an awful lot to him, Nan, you know that."

  "Sara's right. I know my brother-in-law, and he will launch an absolute crusade to take back the peas."

  "Trust me, it's too late for this year," Nan said. "All we can do now is stop posting the land and keep our fingers crossed that the hunters scare the deer away in the autumn."

  "Oh, I wouldn't give up yet," her father said. "And you shouldn't, either. In the meantime, Mother, do you want to play some tennis? I have to get limbered up for Catherine."

  Willow watched her brother try to wrap his hand under the strap of her bathing suit, but he couldn't quite wedge his fingers between the elastic and her shoulder. Still he struggled, and his small nails were starting to tickle her.

  "I'd love to," G
randmother said. "I had a golf lesson this morning, but all we did was stand around with our putters. Boring."

  "Honey, do you want to join us?" her father asked her mother. "Willow, you wouldn't mind watching Patrick, would you?"

  She thought her parents were taking the news about the garden pretty well, and she felt another surge of that affection she'd experienced when she'd been preparing flower arrangements for their bedroom that morning and when she'd turned around at the pool and seen them approaching.

  "Nope," she said, pulling Patrick away from the strap of her Speedo and kissing him once on his nose. The baby gurgled and sighed. She realized, much to her surprise, how happy she was to see him, too.