Read Online Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online

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,”