Before You Know Kindness Part 4

"d.a.m.n right," his brother-in-law agreed, gently squeezing the dog one last time before rising himself, and there in the gathering dark the two men urinated along the edge of the lupine.

IN THE BRIEF MOMENT between when she unsnapped a cup on her nursing bra and brought her son's mouth to her nipple, Sara Seton felt a rush of the crisp twilight air on the sensitive skin on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and she shivered. Then she gently pressed her son's face upon her, his wet maw a lamprey attaching itself to the areola, and she felt her nipple stretching like toffee and then disappearing into the infant's needy mouth. She held her son against her like he was a blanket against the chill, and with her fingers she stroked the down on his head that pa.s.sed for hair. between when she unsnapped a cup on her nursing bra and brought her son's mouth to her nipple, Sara Seton felt a rush of the crisp twilight air on the sensitive skin on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and she shivered. Then she gently pressed her son's face upon her, his wet maw a lamprey attaching itself to the areola, and she felt her nipple stretching like toffee and then disappearing into the infant's needy mouth. She held her son against her like he was a blanket against the chill, and with her fingers she stroked the down on his head that pa.s.sed for hair.

"Fourteen-ten," Charlotte shouted gleefully, holding the birdie in one hand and the racket in the other. The girl was preparing to serve what she and Willow clearly expected would be the game-winning point. Across the net Nan and Catherine stood with their rackets raised as if they were saluting royalty, and while Sara understood that in badminton this was the proper position to await the birdie, she thought they looked ridiculous.

She wasn't happy here on the porch, but she didn't want to go inside with Patrick: Everyone else was outside, either playing badminton or inspecting the gardens. Although this house was extraordinarily cheerful when the sun was high, on cloudy days or at night she found the place capable of inducing a Zoloft-resistant depression. The place was over a century old, and its best feature was the simple fact that it existed at the very top of a ridge of foothills near the White Mountains and it had a wraparound porch facing east, south, and west that allowed one to savor the location. The clapboards, not yet in desperate need of fresh paint but certainly looking a tad tired these days, were dove gray, and the latticework along the bottom of the porch was a long series of diamond-shaped cross-checks. There was fish-scale trim on the first floor and a ma.s.sive cupola bedroom-Nan's-on the third. The house had three more bedrooms on the second floor and a fourth off the kitchen on the first, but other than Nan's third-story empire-adjacent to her bedroom was a small study, her own bathroom, a walk-in closet, and a nook she used to catalog a lifetime's worth of photo alb.u.ms and handwritten correspondence-most were oddly shaped and difficult to furnish despite their size. They had knee walls or dormers or the side of a chimney exactly where you might want to place a bureau. Moreover, the bedrooms-again, Nan's being a notable exception-were dark because the window frames were strangely thin, the curtains upon them were heavy, and the shades had springs so tired they never went all the way up. There were no ceiling fixtures in any of the rooms but the kitchen and the dining room, and every room could have used an additional outlet and a third (or, in some cases, a second) floor lamp. Clearly, the Setons-and Spencer, too-loved the dusky aura of the myriad ill-lit, melancholic rooms that made up the house, the narrow corridors that groaned underfoot, but most of the time she found the place merely gloomy.

The girls and the women in the yard batted the shuttlec.o.c.k back across the net at each other six, eight, ten times, and each moment when her niece or her daughter would strike the red rubber tip Sara thought for sure they would finish off their older relatives, the game would end, and they would all go inside together. Nan was always indefatigable, however, even now at seventy, and Catherine was nothing if not compet.i.tive. Just when Sara was certain that the children had put the previous two generations away, Catherine raced back and hit a long, high lob from the very edge of the baseline that sent Charlotte reeling backward. And though the girl was able to return her mother's desperate shot, her own comeback was soft and Nan was waiting for it at the net, where she slammed it into the gra.s.s at the feet of her lunging granddaughters. The old folks were coming back, and Sara feared now that she might be outside with her son on her chest until it was too dark for any living creatures but the bats.

Seven

There was chaos in the kitchen Sat.u.r.day morning, the very last day in July. Some of it was a simple result of the reality that the household had swollen from three people to eight, two of whom were planning on attending a funeral that day before going to the club. But part of it was due as well to the nature of Nan Seton: The woman had the vigor of a cruise director when it came to outdoor activities and organizing her brood, but her energy level deflated like a blood pressure cuff-you could almost hear the hiss of escaping air-when she was faced with a task that demanded long-term coordination, concentration, and planning. It was one thing to get her granddaughters into age-appropriate swimwear (though Nan was confident that Charlotte's choices in swimwear were inappropriate for any age) and then to the club; it was quite another to redo her kitchen. As a result, the room was in serious need of a makeover. The oven door that summer didn't quite close (which meant that the plastic dials for the burners on the stove had started to melt like images from a Salvador Dali painting); the dishwasher door did close but it demanded two hands and a back that was st.u.r.dy; and Nan insisted on keeping the electric skillet in a section of the counter that meant she had to wind the long cord around a blender with chunks of calcified water clinging to the rotor blades like barnacles, a toaster with sufficient bread crumbs in its base to stuff a turkey, and the baby bottles that had appeared in the night with the speed of b.u.t.ton mushrooms in a wet summer. And, of course, because the telephone in the kitchen still had a receiver that was tethered to the wall unit with a plastic-coated wire, it was not uncommon when two Setons or McCulloughs were trying to cook for one inadvertently to trip or tie up the other.

This morning, moreover, Spencer was making waffles. Consequently, the waffle iron-an antique that looked more like a device the secret police in a third world nation might use to extract a confession from a political prisoner than a kitchen appliance-was taking up s.p.a.ce on the counter as well. The batter, made with soy milk and without eggs, was runnier than regular batter, and so the waffle iron had glacierlike daggers of camel-colored globules running down three of its four sides.

Spencer suspected this morning might not be the best time to be making waffles because his mother-in-law and John were trying to get out the door for a nine thirty funeral. But he told himself he was making the waffles for Charlotte and Willow. He understood this justification wasn't quite true-he guessed he probably would be making waffles now even if he was the only person in the house who was going to eat them-but he felt like waffles, and wasn't this his vacation, too? Besides, he had checked the vegetable garden as soon as he had woken up, and he'd seen that the deer had returned to continue the job they had begun Thursday night. Worse, they had discovered the strawberries, which had arrived weeks late but now, finally, were just about ripe for the picking, and then ravaged the leaves on the raspberry bushes. This meant there would be no strawberry shortcake-or strawberry soup or strawberry smoothies or strawberry pasta-made with their very own strawberries while he was here this week, and there might be no raspberries ever this summer.

Spencer hadn't antic.i.p.ated a huge crop from the transplants this season, but he had expected enough for the family. And so now he was repressing his profound disappointment with food. With waffles.

Around him there was chaos: Mrs. Seton was telling her daughter that the girls' suits had to be hanging outside on the line, but still no one could find Charlotte's suitable Speedo (including Charlotte); John was emptying day-old coffee grounds from the stovetop percolator his mother had used since the Eisenhower administration into the paper grocery bag (already tearing at the bottom from something gooey and wet that had been deposited there the night before after dinner); and his nephew was howling like a police siren while Sara, reduced almost to despair, walked the baby back and forth in the living room. Willow, according to fast-developing family lore the only antidote in the world to a full-blown Patrick Seton tirade, was outside somewhere, searching with Charlotte for the missing swimsuit.

Spencer knew that if he focused on anything other than the physical act of cooking, he would become involved in the bedlam around him and grow angry. Angrier, actually: Already he was exasperated, maddened by the sheer disorganization, by the annoying way everyone was speaking at cross purposes, and (most certainly) by the mess.

Finally Willow appeared, rescuing her mother from her younger brother-a child who had been sobbing for so long with Sara that although he had stopped crying, he now had hiccups that were heart-wrenching-and Spencer was able to concentrate on breakfast. With a decided effort to be serene, he pulled up the top of the press, trimmed away the half-cooked stalact.i.tes of batter from the sides, and deposited onto an antique china plate a waffle at once so perfectly square, evenly browned, and supernaturally fluffy that it looked like it belonged in a gourmet cooking magazine. There was not a corner of this house that did not hold for him a memory of what it was like to be a teenager, away from home and college for the first time in his life, making real money-or what seemed like real money at the time-and spending his days hiking and swimming and hitting tennis b.a.l.l.s with the lovely young woman he knew even then he would marry. Why, he told himself as he savored the sight of this oh-so-perfect waffle, should a little chaos here trouble him now?

Willow brought Patrick over to the plate on the counter and said to her brother, "This, little man, is what a waffle is supposed to look like. Pretty good, huh?"

The baby hiccupped then gurgled.

"Then this one has to be yours," Spencer said. "I picked up some Soy-garine at the health food store on the way home from the club yesterday afternoon."

"The waffles my parents make always pop out of the toaster, and they look like burnt toast," she said.

"Please, enjoy it. Ask Charlotte if she's ready for one, too, okay?"

The girl nodded, stepped around the dishwasher door that hung open like a shin-level metal shelf-a bruise-inducing ledge from another era-scooted past her grandmother, who was saying something about everyone's lack of time if they wanted to get to the club at a decent hour, and called out the front door to her cousin.

JOHN STOOD in the lambent sun of the morning before the vegetable garden in his wing tips, holding a paisley necktie in his hands. He was relieved that he and Sara had planned on his going straight to work after breakfast on Monday, because it meant that he actually had a decent pair of shoes with him this weekend and therefore would not have to attend Walter Durnip's funeral in either golf cleats or sneakers. in the lambent sun of the morning before the vegetable garden in his wing tips, holding a paisley necktie in his hands. He was relieved that he and Sara had planned on his going straight to work after breakfast on Monday, because it meant that he actually had a decent pair of shoes with him this weekend and therefore would not have to attend Walter Durnip's funeral in either golf cleats or sneakers.

He really wasn't surprised that the urine he and Spencer had showered around the edge of the garden last night had done so little to prevent the deer from dining at Chez Seton. Nevertheless, it struck him as a bit of an irony that a little human pee near your tree stand in the woods during rifle season was a way to make absolutely certain that you came home without a buck. When he was out with Howard Mansfield last year and his friend took him up on the U.S. Forest Service's land high on the mountain, they sat for hours in the primitive tree stand Howard's brother had built the year before. They finally moved for the simple reason that they both had to urinate, and rather than hoofing a quarter or half mile away through the snow and then wandering all the way back, they just decided to keep on walking until they found some fresh tracks.

Which they did. Actually, they came across something even better: They found the beds where only moments before deer had been resting, two ovals each the rough size of an automobile tire, the snow melted in the shape of eggs and the newly exposed oak and maple leaves on the forest floor still warm to their touch. Nearby were the piles of small pellets the deer had deposited before settling in. Howard had explained these had been left by a doe and her fawn, and they'd probably been watching the two of them before leaving. A few minutes later they found the tracks where the deer had actually crossed their own path-small divots in the snow and the spongy mud, some in the much larger prints from their own boots-and then they discovered what Howard really was after: the sc.r.a.pes on the ground left by a buck in full rut and fresh hooking on the bark of a small beech tree. The exposed pulp was moist and almost as bright as the snow.

Deer were one of the few things that Mansfield, a justice a decade and change older than John who had been a partner in John's firm when he first moved to Vermont, found more interesting than law. It wasn't merely that he thought they were beautiful (though he often said that he did) or that he was awed by their instincts and reflexes and speed (though he would talk at length if you didn't stop him about particular deer he had witnessed race uphill through boulders and brush with a grace and agility that seemed to put a bullet to shame). It wasn't the grand racks on the bucks he had killed or the deep eyes of the does he had spared. It wasn't the meat, though he did love venison. It was their work ethic. Mansfield was among the most disciplined lawyers John had ever known, and now that he was on the Vermont Supreme Court he was one of the most well-prepared justices. The amount of effort that a deer put into eating-into surviving-awed him. "Imagine," he had said to John that time he had taken the younger man hunting with him, his voice barely more than a whisper as they rested on a small outcropping of stone with a good view of a deer path, "a 150-pound animal has to consume six to eight pounds of food a day to survive." Then he pulled off one of his hunting gloves and ripped the end of a twig off one of the maple saplings beside them, and showed John the tiny, quiescent bud. "How much do you think that weighs? A couple milligrams? A tenth of an ounce? Just think of how much sweat it takes a deer to find his six or eight pounds of food. Especially in the winter."

John knew that a big part of the reason why Mansfield shot a deer every year in Vermont-and, if his schedule permitted, another in New York and then a third in Maine-was because he believed it was the most merciful way humans had to manage the herd. The reality was that in much of America, the only predator left to keep the deer population at a number the habitat could support was man. Without hunting, the thousands of deer that hunters killed pretty close to instantly would overpopulate and then either die slowly of starvation when the heavy northern winter set in, or weakened by malnutrition they would be eaten alive-their haunches and legs and their bellies consumed first-by coyotes.

John watched Mansfield track the deer for the rest of the day, following the animal's rubs and sc.r.a.pes and his prints, but they never saw him. There was no doubt that he saw them, but he always kept just enough distance that neither of the men even flipped off the safeties on their rifles or brought their Redfield scopes to their eyes.

Still, it had been a wonderful day and John understood why Howard loved hunting. With the exception of the occasional squeals from the blue jays, the woods were completely silent when they stood still or were sitting in Mansfield's brother's tree stand. They were hunting in a part of the forest where there didn't seem to be signs of any other hunters-no gunshots in the distance, no spots where leaves had been cleared so a hunter could move his body without making a sound if he saw a buck he wanted to shoot-and John couldn't imagine a setting more peaceful. His mind wandered, but then he would watch Mansfield running his dry fingers over a beech leaf or he himself would catch a glimpse of the peak of the mountain behind them through the trees, and he would remember why he was there, his focus would return, and he would experience an almost trancelike contentment.

He'd tried to describe it to Sara that first night, and she observed that a part of the sensation probably had just been fatigue. For nine-plus hours he had either been hoofing around in the snow or sitting on a rock or a tree stand in the cold, and he was exhausted. He thought she might have been right, but that didn't change the fact that the sensation had been pleasurable. And that night, just as Mansfield had promised, he had eaten like he had a hollow leg and slept more deeply than he could remember.

The next day, when John was back in his office, Howard Mansfield went back up on the mountain and bagged a 195-pound eight-pointer. John was not exactly envious, but he was disappointed. The day before he had lugged his eight pounds of rifle through the woods and hadn't fired it once. Those bra.s.sy missiles he'd loaded so carefully into his rifle when they first exited Mansfield's truck-and then unloaded with equal caution when they returned at the end of the day-had never once exploded down the barrel and brought down a deer or even taken a little bark off a tree. Twice more that season he'd ventured into the woods, and though he enjoyed his time slogging through the wet leaves and the thin crusts of snow, he still hadn't gotten his buck. It was on that last excursion, when he'd been alone, that for some reason he'd been unable to eject the bullet from the gun.

"Are you ready, John?"

He turned and saw his mother was beside him. "Yes. Absolutely."

"After the funeral, let's stop by the Grangers' farm stand on the way to the club," she said. "They have wonderful zucchini and string beans right now, and we don't."

He nodded and pulled his tie through the collar of his shirt. It saddened him that their vegetables that night wouldn't come from their own tilled bit of earth.

INSIDE THE HOUSE Willow pushed a small square of Soy-garine off the top of her waffle, having decided that the b.u.t.ter subst.i.tute tasted even worse than it looked. There was a reason this stuff didn't have people at Land O Lakes quaking in their boots. Her younger brother sat watching her in his blue canvas baby seat, occasionally plugging his small mouth with parts of his fist. The seat was in the middle of the table, as if Patrick were a centerpiece. Willow pushed a small square of Soy-garine off the top of her waffle, having decided that the b.u.t.ter subst.i.tute tasted even worse than it looked. There was a reason this stuff didn't have people at Land O Lakes quaking in their boots. Her younger brother sat watching her in his blue canvas baby seat, occasionally plugging his small mouth with parts of his fist. The seat was in the middle of the table, as if Patrick were a centerpiece.

Through the dining room window she and Charlotte saw John and Nan leaving for Walter Durnip's funeral in Grandmother's antique gray Chevrolet. Willow wasn't sure how old the vehicle was, but she knew that Grandmother had bought it well before her own parents had gotten married. It wasn't simply preair bag; it was preCD player, preca.s.sette player, preseat belts with a strap across the chest. It didn't even have an FM radio.

Charlotte, Willow observed, didn't seem to mind her father's b.u.t.ter subst.i.tute, or even the fact that although Uncle Spencer's waffle looked perfect, it had a strangely bitter aftertaste that Willow presumed had something to do with the soy milk. Her cousin sat in her skimpy white shorts with her bare legs underneath her in one of the antique ladder-back chairs around the dining room table, happily cutting the waffle apart with her fork, occasionally reaching down to peel a bit of burned skin off her thigh.

Abruptly she looked up at Willow and said, "Some teenagers are going to have a bonfire and their own party tonight at the club." That evening they were all going to the annual midsummer blowout at the Contour Club, which was one of the reasons why Grandmother wanted everyone here this particular weekend: She liked to show off her family.

"Are you going to go?"

"I might. Connor told me about it," she said. Connor, Willow knew, was a fifteen-year-old who came to the club under duress, but when he was there Charlotte didn't take her eyes off him. He never went near the pool, had no interest in golf, but twice in the last week the two girls had watched him play tennis. It was clear he was one of the few members of the Contour Club who might have been able to give Aunt Catherine a little compet.i.tion. He had green eyes-though the girls had only seen them one time, because he almost always wore sungla.s.ses-a little dark fuzz above his lip, and hair as black as Charlotte's string bikini.

"When were you talking to Connor?"

"He called."

"Really?"

"Well, he called across the gra.s.s."

"To you?"

Charlotte shrugged, and Willow guessed that small shoulder spasm meant that Connor had yelled across the gra.s.s by the Contour Club's terrace to some other teenager about the bonfire on Sat.u.r.day night, and Charlotte had overheard him.

"Anyway, I think I might go," Charlotte murmured.

"You can't have a bonfire until it's dark out, and Grandmother will want us to go home by eight or eight thirty."

"My dad will pick me up in that case," she said, and then she called into the kitchen where her father was still at work beside the waffle iron, "Right, Dad?"

"Right what, honey?"

"Some of the kids are having a bonfire tonight. Can I go?"

"You mean at the club?"

"Uh-huh."

He strolled into the dining room with a dishtowel slung over his shoulder. "I think a bonfire sounds nice. Can grown-ups go, too?"

"Nope. Just kids."

"Too bad. How old will the kids be?"

"Oh, my age-and some older kids, too, of course, so the adults don't need to worry."

He smiled. "The presence of teenagers is supposed to make me worry less?"

"Well, you know, in terms of the fire. There will be older kids there so you don't need to fear we'll, like, burn down the woods."

"Gotcha."

"So we can go?"

"I don't see why not."

"The thing is, it might go on a little later than the c.o.c.ktail party you and Mom will be at," she said.

"I understand. We'll obviously have a couple of cars. I don't mind hanging around so I can drive you girls home."

"Thank you, Dad."

Willow watched her uncle, and she thought that he might have been about to lean over and kiss his daughter on her forehead, but then he seemed to think better of the idea. Maybe he thought he'd embarra.s.s her. Instead he bent down and kissed his nephew on the boy's cheek, oblivious to the long tendrils of drool that were hanging off the infant's chin or that linked his mouth and his hand like filaments from a spider's web. Then Uncle Spencer returned to the kitchen, where Willow heard the waffle iron sc.r.a.pe along the counter as he lifted the metal lid.

"See how easy that was?" Charlotte said. "My dad usually says yes to the things that don't involve any work, so he can say no to the things that do. We can go."

"You can go. I'm not sure I want to hang around with a bunch of teenagers."

"Suit yourself."

"Won't you be nervous?"

"I'm sure there will be thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds there, too."

"And sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds."

"Doubt it. Anyone around here old enough to drive has better places to go on a Sat.u.r.day night than the Contour Club."

Willow heard her mother pad lightly down the steps from the second floor. She had been upstairs showering and getting dressed.

"Ask your mom if you can go," Charlotte said to her now. "Tell her my dad said it was okay with him, and he'd drive us home."

Reminding herself that she could change her mind that afternoon if she didn't want to tag along with Charlotte while her cousin lied about her age to a bunch of tenth- and eleventh-graders, she nodded, and when her mother wandered into the dining room-her hair in a towel because it was wet, but her eyes more refreshed than they'd been before she had climbed into the shower-she asked if she, too, could go to the bonfire.

Eight

Catherine stood at the baseline of the northernmost of the four courts at the Contour Club Sat.u.r.day morning, a wire basket of yellow tennis b.a.l.l.s at her feet. The sun was behind her, and she allowed herself a hearty grunt with each serve into the ether on the other side of the net, the exhalations conjuring like a faint breeze across her tongue the dim but pleasurable memory of that single slice of her mother's bologna she'd eaten surrept.i.tiously before leaving with Sara and the girls for the club. She could feel sweat trickling down her shoulder blades and puddling in the small of her back. The grunts, she knew, were making the older men on the court beside her uncomfortable. At the Contour Club, people did not grunt-especially when they were practicing their serve all alone. Even those few members who actually lived in New Hampshire year-round knew enough not to grunt. Grunting, as her mother would say with a sniff, was awfully animalistic. And though Nan was preternaturally athletic for someone her age, she also believed it was inappropriate-unseemly, she would have said-to be too too compet.i.tive. Grunters, it was clear, were people who tried way too hard. compet.i.tive. Grunters, it was clear, were people who tried way too hard.

The first time her mother had watched her play in a tournament in college-just after Catherine had discovered the power grunting added to her game-she had pulled her aside after the match and asked her what sort of unladylike gremlin had taken over her mouth. Catherine knew instantly what her mother was referring to, but she had won that morning against a high-seeded girl who was two years older than she was, and so she wasn't about to stop grunting.

"UNNHH!" she cried out now, as she felt the wind from her swing on her legs.

She wasn't exactly sure why she was taking such pleasure this morning in her grunts-each sharp, abbreviated syllable sounded downright melodious in her ear, and she loved the feel of her teeth against her tongue as she finished-but she understood that on some level this was (as her sister-in-law the therapist would say) a hostile gesture. Still, why she should be feeling hostile here and now was not entirely clear to her. After all, Charlotte and her niece seemed happy enough at the pool, her brother was holding up their generation's honor at old Walter Durnip's funeral, Sara was dozing on a blanket in the shade with Patrick, and Spencer was off at some garden nursery, seeing if there was anything at all the experts there could suggest to buffer the sad remains of the garden from the deer.

The deer. She paused with the tennis ball in her hand and rolled her thumb over the fuzz. She wondered if she was actually angry right now at the deer for devouring the garden. Her husband's garden. It was possible, she decided. But it wasn't likely: She viewed the garden with the same benign distance that she tolerated Charlotte's glitter cosmetics. It demanded a tad more of her attention than she cared to invest, but it was essentially harmless.

And despite the ruination brought about by the deer, Spencer had seemed happy enough this morning when he'd made the girls all those waffles. (She had been relieved to see that for all her daughter's neuroses and burgeoning adolescent angst, it was highly unlikely the kid was ever going to have an eating disorder. She'd wolfed down three of her dad's waffles before leaving for the club.) On the other hand, those waffles had annoyed her. The last thing her mother needed this morning was more commotion in the kitchen. Sara, of course, would probably remind her that her anger had nothing to do with the way Spencer's cooking had added to the Sat.u.r.day morning confusion; rather, her sister-in-law would speculate-gently-that perhaps she was jealous because the waffles had allowed Spencer to further endear himself to the girls. There she was trying to appease her mother and organize the children, while her husband was (uncharacteristically) the anarchist who was reaping the children's approval.

She tossed the ball high over her head, and with the loudest, most atavistic grunt yet sent the orb in a clothesline-straight stripe into the far court. "UNNHH!"

No, she decided firmly, as the ball bounced against the chain-link fence in the corner, whatever pebble was wedged inside her soul right now had nothing at all to do with either those waffles or the deer in the garden. It was something else: her frustration with Spencer throughout the spring and summer, perhaps, or the way they hadn't found time for each other while Charlotte had been here in the country. That's what it was.

Maybe this afternoon they would have some time alone together to talk and she would tell him. Something's wrong between us, Something's wrong between us, she heard herself murmuring to the man in her head. she heard herself murmuring to the man in her head. We can't go on as we are. We can't go on as we are. They'd go for a long walk like they did when they were younger, when they were in college, and she would tell him, They'd go for a long walk like they did when they were younger, when they were in college, and she would tell him, We've grown apart. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. We've grown apart. We've grown apart. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. We've grown apart. If not today, then maybe tomorrow. Maybe she'd tell him on Sunday. If not today, then maybe tomorrow. Maybe she'd tell him on Sunday.

Or, perhaps, the week after next. When they were home in Manhattan.

And maybe she needed to begin with something softer in any case: Something is troubling you. Something is troubling us. We need counseling. Something is troubling you. Something is troubling us. We need counseling. Counseling was a reasonable step, wasn't it? They had almost seventeen years of marriage and a daughter who would turn thirteen in a month. Counseling was a reasonable step, wasn't it? They had almost seventeen years of marriage and a daughter who would turn thirteen in a month.