Free Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian

expectancy for a now sixty-four-year-old widower, followed her quickly. A series of strokes at weekly intervals beginning nine months after her funeral. He spent a month in the hospital, unable to speak, then move, then breathe. Charlotte had been in kindergarten at the time. They returned from Long Ridge to Manhattan soon after that, though Spencer didn’t really believe there was a connection.
    As a child Spencer hadn’t understood why his family moved so often and why he went to so many schools. Why he had to figure out so many unspoken dress codes—each one more subtle than the one that preceded it—between the seventh and twelfth grade. Obviously his father wasn’t wanted by the law, and he traveled almost not at all for business. Still, Spencer didn’t spend a whole lot of time with him growing up. And when he did, his memories were mostly about silence: His dad appearing once in a while—almost like a vision—in the small bleachers at the baseball field when his Little League team had a game. His dad tying a necktie in the mirror in the front hall of the house in . . . in either Rye or that first one in Hartsdale, Spencer couldn’t be sure . . . before leaving unusually early for work one morning and whispering conspiratorially that they shouldn’t wake his mother. His father falling asleep at nine thirty at night in front of the television set in the family room, alone, an unfinished scotch and water (mostly scotch, despite the ice cube that had melted) on the table beside him.
    Sometimes Spencer and his sister, a girl only eighteen months younger than he, would water down the bottles of Cutty Sark and J&B Rare. They’d measure where on the schooner’s sails the scotch was on the Cutty Sark label, pour out between half an inch and an inch, and then replace it with exactly as much water and—if they had noticeably diluted the color—a drop or two of their mother’s dark apple cider vinegar.
    He had few memories, he realized, of his father and his mother ever chatting with each other when he was a child. On some level, they loved each other: He saw just how much when his mother was dying. But other than he and his sister—and a shared tendency to drink way too much and then grow acrimonious—they really had very little in common. They never divorced, and it was only in college that he decided they probably should have. After all, he had an abundance of recollections of the two of them squabbling in six or seven different houses, and he wondered if everyone would have been happier if the two of them had separated.
    Later, as a grown-up, he conjectured they might have moved so many times when he was a child because it gave his mother—a woman much smarter than his father—a way to fill her days. She could pack and unpack and redecorate, and perhaps she wanted something to do more than she wanted a divorce.
    What Spencer lacked in close friends, he had tried to make up for in pets. He was never a brooding child or even a churlish one. But he did keep his emotional distance, because eventually that distance would become geographic and—to an eight- or a ten- or a twelve-year-old boy—prohibitive.
    Thus there were, invariably, the dogs and the cats. He had both as a boy. In every neighborhood there was a golden lab that was pregnant or a stray cat with a litter of kittens in someone’s garage. Only rarely did his parents deny him one. It actually became a part of the family lore, the stories his parents would tell their new acquaintances at cocktail parties in their new towns: The boy and his dogs. And cats. The boy who would rescue a raccoon. His mother regaled his mother-in-law with that tale the day they were introduced.
    In New Canaan the menagerie peaked at three dogs and four cats. Then his father accidentally backed the Impala over the sleeping mutt that looked a lot like a springer spaniel. His parents fought and soon (once again) they had moved. In truth, Spencer knew, it had nothing to