Free Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian Page B

and his pants—khakis and shorts and even a pair of golf slacks—from his suitcase, stuffed the helmet with his underwear and socks, and then wedged everything back inside his very well-traveled American Tourister twenty-inch Cabin Carry-On. It wasn’t nearly as neat as it had been, and so he’d spent the rest of the morning seething—more at himself than at her because he knew he had overreacted. But the end result was the same: a tense and wearisome silence. He retreated into the quiet of their two cats, pulling a dining room chair over to the living room couch on which they were dozing in the sun and noiselessly running his fingers over their fur. Then he reread for the third time the note they would be leaving for the teenage girl on their floor who was going to feed the animals and change their litter box. It was a complicated set of instructions, because it wasn’t easy to keep a cat vegan.
    There was no dog in their life and he wished that there were. Unfortunately, once in a mood of self-righteous obstinacy, he’d proclaimed their apartment was too small for one. He’d insisted it would be cruel to coop one up for a whole day there. He no longer believed that (had he ever?), but he was, he knew, disablingly—perhaps self-destructively—stubborn.
    Now on the plane he resolved he would behave better. He reached across the aisle to feel (at once so like and unlike that of a cat) the soft down on Catherine’s wrist and her arm, bare even in the chill of this claustrophobic passenger cabin. Lightly he stroked the skin just above her thumb and along the back of her hand. Though the house in New Hampshire belonged to Mrs. Seton, he had been coming here for two decades, and it was as close to a familial motherland as he had: a place with memories and roots that transcended the itinerant nature of his own suburban upbringing. He loved the house, he believed, more than did his wife and his brother-in-law, who had known it their entire lives and now took it for granted, and at least as much as his mother-in-law, who slipped into a life there each summer with the same blissful sigh she’d exhale when she’d plunge into the crisp waters of Echo Lake.
    He gave Catherine’s hand a small squeeze, but she continued to read. She was still angry with him. Once they were on the ground and he wouldn’t have to shout, he would apologize to her for being a . . . a jerk. Yes, that was right. A jerk.
    From the intercom speaker above them he heard a series of scratchy, incomprehensible prerecorded syllables—there was no flight attendant on this route—and he knew it was the message reminding them to have their tray tables locked in their upright positions and their seats fully forward, because they were about to land.
     
    AT THE RENT-A-CAR COUNTER, while a good-natured wisp of a teen girl printed out the forms for the vehicle they were taking for the next week and a half—a minivan almost (but not quite) large enough for the extended family and their golf clubs—Catherine Seton-McCullough used her cell phone to leave a message on her mother’s answering machine. She wanted to let her know that they had landed and would be at the house in about ninety minutes. Five o’clock at the latest. No doubt everyone was still at the club, taking whatever lessons Mother had lined up.
    Spencer had apologized and she was grateful. But only to an extent. She still wasn’t exactly sure what she should say because she was filled with a nauseating, almost debilitating sense of dread that her marriage was . . . winding down. And she was scared. She could no longer see anything behind Spencer’s eyes but annoyance—and Lord knows how she hated this word—
issues.
She taught English and literature to high school girls at the Brearley School on the Upper East Side, and this spring the headmaster had brought in a consultant who called herself a corporate interdependence trainer and the woman had used that word—
issues
—as a