Eight
Catherine stood at the baseline of the northernmost of the four courts at the Contour Club Saturday morning, a wire basket of yellow tennis balls 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 surreptitiously 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 competitive. 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 Saturday 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, she heard herself murmuring to the man in her head. 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, 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.
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. 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.
Maybe they’d simply married too young. Certainly everyone had said so at the time. They’d married a mere seven months after finishing college, convinced there was no reason to wait because they’d been dating since they were freshmen. And less than four years after that she’d gotten pregnant, and she had been thrilled because she loved children—it was why she became a teacher—and he was thrilled because he seemed to love everything. Monkeys. Cats. Babies.
But they never did have another child, did they? They talked about it. And they thought they would. They assumed they would, especially when they were planning their brief, failed foray into Connecticut. But that experiment had left them all miserable, and so they’d moved back to the city and, somehow, the idea of another child was left behind in the suburbs. The timing, they told themselves, just hadn’t been right.
Same with the dog that Charlotte had wanted. It just didn’t seem to make sense to get one—at least not to Spencer—once they returned to Manhattan. He worried that the apartment wasn’t big enough for the kind of dog their young daughter desired (one, naturally enough, like Grandmother’s), and, besides, they already had a pair of cats.
“You have one hell of a serve.”
She turned and wiped her brow. There on the grass stood a young man in sneakers and baggy khaki shorts—one of the lifeguards, she believed—with a tennis racket and a can of balls in his hand. Something was sparkling on his left earlobe, and she couldn’t tell from this distance whether it was a stud or a legitimate rock of some sort.
“It’s not what it was fifteen years ago,” she said.
“It looks mighty fine to me.” She had the sense that he was making a leap from her serve to . . . to her.
“Trust me: It isn’t what it once was. Nothing is.”
“Can I join you? I was looking for a game.”
She gazed at the nearly empty basket at her feet. She’d planned on heading back to the pool soon, and diving into the water and splashing around with her daughter and her niece. Moreover, if this young man was a lifeguard, then the old guard on the courts to her left—the conservative codgers who disapproved of her grunts—would be miffed that she was playing tennis with him on a Saturday morning. He was, in their opinion . . . the help.
That, of course, was reason enough to play with him in her mind. Not unlike her own daughter, she took great satisfaction from the torments she inflicted on the older generation. Besides, he was awfully cute.
“You don’t honestly think you can keep up with me, do you?” she asked, raising a single eyebrow.
He smiled. “I think I can try.”
There didn’t seem to be anybody else waiting, and so she nodded. “Okay. A couple games,” she agreed. “What’s your name?”
“Gary. Gary Winslow. My grandfather is—”
“Your grandfather is Kelsey Winslow, of course,” she said, and she understood instantly why this lifeguard was so comfortable wandering around the courts right now looking for a game. Gary was working here for the summer, yes, but he was also a member. His parents had died in the attack on the World Trade Center, when the two of them had had the misfortune of being on one of the early-morning planes out of Boston that were plunged into the towers like missiles. Gary’s father was an anesthesiologist and he was on his way to a symposium in San Francisco. Gary’s mother was accompanying him for no other reason than the fact that the conference was in northern California and she’d never been there. Ever since then Gary and his sister (whose name, at the moment, escaped Catherine) had been raised by Kelsey and Irene Winslow.
“And you’re Nan Seton’s daughter, right?” he said, vaguely mimicking the sudden recognition that had marked her own voice. “Charlotte McCullough’s mom?”
“I am.”
“Charlotte’s a terrific kid. Wants to be nineteen, but she’s a sweet girl. Good little swimmer, too. I keep a close eye on her, of course—on both her and her cousin. But I can assure you: She’s a real water rat.”
Catherine found herself nodding, and two unattractive thoughts simultaneously filled her head: The first was incredulity that anyone would ever refer to Charlotte McCullough as “a sweet girl”; the second was the realization that before she had understood that Gary was a Winslow—no, before she had understood that he was that orphan Winslow—she had seen him only as a cheeky young lifeguard with very nice arms, more hair than her husband, and an apparent interest in her despite the fact she was the mother of one of the girls he was watching that summer. He was, she guessed, not quite half her age. She was acting like Mrs. Robinson, for God’s sake! Usually the men with whom she flirted at least had finished college.
Still, he had been the one to approach her, hadn’t he? What the hell?
A sweet girl.
That orphan.
Mrs. Robinson.
Quickly she grabbed a ball, hurled it into the air, and then slammed it as hard as she could into the far court. The ball passed so close to the white ridge along the crest of the net that the plastic fluttered just the tiniest bit, and in her head she heard the echo of her grunt: Unnhh!
“Let’s go,” she said to Gary, and the young man smiled and jogged to the other side of the court.
YOU CAN’T SHOOT a buck out of season, and you can’t shoot a doe ever. Not in Vermont, not here.
That was what John had said to Sara in the small hours of the night—no more than eight or nine hours ago, now—after he had changed Patrick’s small diaper and she was nursing the baby back to sleep. It had come up because their bedroom window was open, and once Patrick had settled down they could listen to the wind in the lupine and John thought he might have heard animals rustling just outside the house. In the garden, perhaps. He wasn’t exactly talking to himself as he stood before the screen, but she knew that he didn’t expect an answer, either.
Still, with her son lolling against her breast she had felt compelled to remind him that she couldn’t imagine him shooting a deer over Spencer’s kohlrabi or green beans, anyway.
No, he’d said. Of course not.
She sat now in the cool shade in the grass near the swimming pool with Patrick in his baby seat beside her and wondered why her husband would even be thinking of such things in the middle of the night. She watched the two girls dive, and it made her forget the deer and the garden for a moment. She was impressed with their grace and their courage. How Charlotte had learned to stand on the board with her back to the water, throw her hips high into the air, curl her body back toward the fiberglass, and then dive into the water—the rear of her skull so close to the board that Sara flinched the first time her niece demonstrated an inward—was beyond her. The fact that her own daughter, still two years younger than Charlotte, had learned to do a somersault over the past two weeks was equally as amazing. She knew they had been taught by the young woman who was the lifeguard this morning, a plump girl between her junior and senior years at the high school in Littleton. She never expected overweight teens—boys as well as girls—to be sufficiently comfortable with their bodies to thrive in any activity that involved limited amounts of clothing. This girl, however, was an apparent exception. She seemed to wear a towel around her waist like a skirt when she wasn’t actually in the water, but otherwise she seemed completely at ease with the bulk she had wedged into her spandex. And she dove, Sara thought, like the small kestrels and falcons she’d seen darting through the air from the cliffs off Snake Mountain.
She politely clapped when Willow showed her a forward dive in the pike position. Her baby’s eyes followed her hands and then he cooed.
“Yes,” she murmured to him, leaning over to press her nose against his, “someday I will clap for you, too. Yes, I will.”
Her daughter emerged from the water and raced across the grass to her, wrapping herself quickly in a towel. “At the bonfire tonight,” Willow began, her sentence choppy because she was bouncing on one foot with her head angled to the side, “Charlotte said I can borrow her eye shadow. May I?”
“The stuff she was wearing last night at dinner?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why would you want to? It’s purple, isn’t it?”
“No. It’s lavender.”
“Oh.”
“So it’s okay?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Is it that you think ten is too young or you think I shouldn’t wear eye shadow to a bonfire?” She had stopped hopping, but her teeth were chattering now.
“It’s probably a little of both,” she answered, and then said—her change of mood so abrupt that Patrick looked at her and clucked—“Oh, of course it’s fine. Of course you may.”
Willow smiled and then made Sara’s morning more perfect than she had supposed it could be: The girl leaned over and kissed her warmly on her cheek, despite the nearby presence of Cousin Charlotte and the teenage lifeguard who had taught them to dive.
CATHERINE PADDED ACROSS the grass toward her sister-in-law and her nephew like a cat. Not a timid house cat: a feral cat, a mouser, the sort of strong and lithe feline that kills for a living. Her tennis sneakers barely touched the ground as she walked, and though she was sweating—it had taken her more effort to dispose of young Gary Winslow than she had expected—she wasn’t tired and she moved with an undulant allure.
“That’s Willow’s mom, right?” Gary said to her as they approached Sara.
“Yes, indeed.”
“A shrink?”
“Therapist,” she answered, and as she said the word she wondered what her sister-in-law the therapist would think when she turned around and saw her striding across the grass with this young buck of a teenager. The truth was that Gary was simply going to introduce himself to the woman who was Willow’s mom and then change into a swimsuit for his shift at the pool (and, suddenly, she thought of the swimsuit she had with her in her canvas bag and feared that it would seem matronly to this . . . boy). That was the only reason he was coming this way with her, after all, it wasn’t really like the two of them were . . . together. But Catherine wondered if someone less perceptive than Sara might presume there was something vaguely untoward about her spending time with a strange teenager, the two of them glistening with sweat.
Sara looked up from the baby at her side and held her hand flat over her wild eyebrows like a visor. And the woman did indeed have big eyebrows. Sara was attractive, but with her eyebrows in need of attention, her coffee-colored hair the length of a teenager’s—hair that was growing now the first telltale filaments of white, a few strands sprinkled in amid the brown just above her ears—and those eyeglasses even more dated than the ones worn by her own brother, John, she looked a tad too earthy for Catherine. Especially today in those sandals with clunky straps and those shorts the color of army fatigues.
Catherine remembered when John had first brought Sara to Manhattan to meet their mother and her and Spencer. John had discovered her while skiing in Vermont—within weeks, actually, of her and Spencer’s own wedding—and unlike almost everyone else in the lodge that afternoon she was actually from the Green Mountains. Had grown up in a town northeast of Burlington. Her father taught at the University of Vermont, in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and he was one of the country’s leading experts on a bug with the appalling-sounding name of the pear thrip. Being an expert on the pear thrip mattered in Vermont, because pear thrips liked to eat maple tree leaves. Sara’s mother was the secretary at the village’s elementary school, but she had recently retired. In any case, when Sara first saw the courtyard and the columns in Nan Seton’s Manhattan apartment building, the cobblestone circle into which the town cars and taxis would travel while awaiting the privileged who lived in the great monolith of a structure, the doormen—there was not a single doorman, not here; there was instead a cadre of wizened old men and enthusiastic young ones scattered throughout the courtyard and standing vigil inside the elevators, some in blue uniforms and some in gray, all of whom had thick, lyric Irish accents—and then the endless sprawl that was the apartment itself, she seemed ill at ease. She had been quiet when she was getting the tour, and when she finally said something more than a monosyllabic murmur of appreciation, she had shaken her head and announced in a voice—playful, yes, but the awe, it was clear, was real, too—“Imagine. And to think I’d thought that everybody in New York City (at least everybody I’d ever meet) lived in those teeny-tiny studios where you slept on a convertible couch by the kitchen.” Catherine remembered that her mother had been charming: She laughed and with a self-deprecating shrug explained to John’s girlfriend that she and her husband had bought the apartment in the mid-1970s, when Manhattan real estate was worth a little less than property along the Love Canal. Nevertheless, Catherine thought that while there had been wonderment in Sara’s reaction, there had also been a slight whiff of disapproval—as if Sara saw something decadent in the plates with the gold leaf in the breakfront or in the notion that although there wasn’t a live-in maid, there really were two small bedrooms in the back of the apartment near the kitchen that were referred to as the maids’ rooms. Catherine recalled experiencing an unpleasant quiver of guilt, and suddenly the Japanese screens and the Italian floor tile seemed ostentatious. Showy. Dissolute.
Yet Sara never seemed to manifest any particular bias toward either the proletariat or the rustic sugar makers, loggers, or beleaguered dairy farmers in her own corner of the country, and so over time Catherine decided that she had read more into Sara’s reaction than was there. Still, Sara’s upcountry lack of refinement had made an impression on Catherine, and though Sara had since earned a series of postgraduate degrees and then joined a large and thriving counseling practice, in some ways Catherine still viewed the woman—even though she and Sara were in fact the same age—as a younger sister who would always need a bit of her guidance.
Behind Sara, Catherine saw their two girls sitting on towels on the cement on the side of the pool. Her daughter was wearing a tank suit today, because—bless her own mother’s heart—yesterday Nan had accidentally left the two strips of black that Charlotte had chosen as her summer bathing suit in the trunk of the car overnight, and when they finally found them this morning they had still been damp and they smelled like a tire iron. Even her daughter had had the common sense to see that she couldn’t wear the string thing today, and she had donned her green and yellow Speedo without a fuss.
“Sara, this is Gary Winslow,” she said, and quickly Gary squatted like a baseball catcher so that he was eye level with her sister-in-law. She hadn’t expected this sort of impulsive graciousness on the lad’s part, and she was impressed. “Gary is a lifeguard,” she added. “His grandparents are Kelsey and Irene Winslow.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Sara said.
“I’ve had a wonderful time watching over your daughter this month. She’s terrific,” he told her, and Catherine felt a twinge of jealousy, a small spasm of resentment. This was awfully similar to what he had said to her about her own daughter when he’d introduced himself at the tennis court not forty-five minutes ago.
“She’s having a nice summer,” Sara said. “Thank you.”
“And this must be her brother. Patrick, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
He smiled at the infant, and then with a teenage boy’s complete unease around babies—a discomfort that actually bordered on fear—he quickly turned back to Sara. Patrick reached out a hand toward him, batting at the air, and he might have cried out for this new person to pay him the attention he was accustomed to receiving, but he seemed to like the swishing feel the air made on his skin when he sliced his arm like a sword. “Has Willow showed you how well she can dive?” Gary asked.
“She has. It was one of the first things she did when we got to the club yesterday. She and Charlotte have been at it again most of this morning. They only stopped a couple of minutes ago.”
“Gwen is teaching them. I can’t dive to save my life, but Gwen is awesome. She’s got the girls doing somersaults and inwards. Amazing.”
“I saw.”
“Mrs. McCullough just destroyed me on the tennis court. You play?” he asked.
Catherine found herself looking away, slightly relieved that he had called her Mrs. McCullough in front of her sister-in-law. At the tennis court, when they were changing sides after their fifth game, he had referred to her as Mrs. McCullough with such obsequiousness that she had told him he could call her Catherine. And, for the rest of the match, he had. Now, however, she was glad that he understood instinctively that around Sara a certain deference was in order.
So long, of course, as he didn’t overdo it.
“I only play when I’m here,” Sara replied, and she made it sound as if she played under duress. As if someone—a Seton, a McCullough—put a gun to her head.
“We just had an awesome game—me and Mrs. McCullough.”
Catherine rolled her eyes for Sara’s benefit. Now he was overdoing it: One “Mrs. McCullough” was appropriate; two, especially in such close proximity, made her sound geriatric.
“Oh, so that’s what you were doing,” Sara said, as if she hadn’t known. As if she thought the tennis rackets they were holding were mere props. She was smiling when she said it so Catherine would know she was kidding.
“Yup,” Gary said, and then his eyes trailed down Sara’s legs to her ankle. “I like your tattoo.”
“Ah, yes. I got that years ago.”
“It’s pretty.”
“Thank you.”
Catherine understood why men found tattoos on a woman erotic: It suggested she enjoyed forbidden things, was excited by taboos. It meant that she thought about her body as an object of ornamentation (or that she simply thought about her body at all). Still, Catherine didn’t see how a wraparound tattoo of a little ivy could compensate for such dowdy shorts.
She was about to say something now to pull Gary’s eyes away from her sister-in-law’s legs, and her mind was trying to finalize the thought: perhaps note that Sara was married to her older brother. She didn’t have to open her mouth to divert the young man’s attention, however, because in the sky in the distance they all heard a small engine, and they looked up at once and saw an ultralight plane—a hang glider with an engine, really—moving in slow motion against the hulking silhouette of Mount Lafayette. Gary stood so he could see it better, and even the pair of girls by the pool left their towels on the cement and ran over so they, too, could watch the strange, birdlike machine motor high above them in the crisp, cloudless air.
FROM THE PARKING LOT of the garden nursery Spencer could also hear the steady rumble of the ultralight, but he had no interest in the craft. He stood before the minivan for barely an additional second before climbing inside and slamming the door. Slamming it so hard the four thousand pounds of rented metal actually rocked back and forth on the wide radial tires. He had bought nothing, and he was frustrated. No urines, no pepper sprays, no magic deterrent that would keep the deer at a distance. He was going to drive now to the club with absolutely nothing to show for his visit to the garden center—or, for that matter, for the hour and a half he had spent surfing the Web that morning, enduring the nightmarishly sluggish download of each image onto his laptop computer’s screen.
He wondered what the ancient Stoics did to protect their produce—or the Essenes or the Manicheans. Actually, he had a dispiriting feeling he knew what the Manicheans did: They probably posted their slaves in their gardens. Clearly that wasn’t an option here.
Nevertheless, it infuriated him that the only thing even the owner of the nursery himself could suggest was a fence.
“Make it six and a half to ten feet high, and you should be in business,” the guy had said. “You’ll be safe from most deer if you make it six and a half feet tall, but you’ll be safe to the max if you go for a ten-footer. No deer is going to jump three yards and change to get a little Swiss chard.”
The owner had long, jet black hair that he tied back in a ponytail, and the reddest eyes Spencer had ever seen at ten thirty in the morning. Or, at least, the reddest eyes he had seen at ten thirty in the morning since college. He was so thin that he looked almost gaunt, and he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with a silkscreen of a massive, fully open crimson peony on the front. Spencer could almost see real ants attempting to climb among the two-dimensional petals. The owner had a smaller, less vibrant tattoo of a flower on each of his biceps. One looked to be a faded purple pansy, but Spencer couldn’t quite tell what the other one was. Monkshood, maybe. Foxglove, perhaps. Maybe it wasn’t even a flower at all: Maybe it was a biker’s helmet of some sort. Either way, it was rough-looking—both the tattoos were—and nothing like the delicate, almost genteel bit of latticework that his own sister-in-law had had needled into the skin around her ankle when she was eighteen.
“I don’t want a fence,” Spencer had told him.
“Then get a great big thorny thing.”
“A great big thorny thing?” Spencer asked. He expected more precision from the owner of the nursery than “a great big thorny thing.”
“Rows of them. Build walls and walls of big thorny things. Deer hate thorns. Me, too. Don’t carry a whole lot that has thorns—other than roses, of course. No one likes thorns, you know?”
“I do know. Certainly I don’t like them.”
“Evergreens, then? How about evergreens? I got two or three Fat Alberts you could take with you. Three seventy-five apiece,” he said, and Spencer knew enough about trees to know that he meant $375.
“I doubt three would be enough.”
“Oh, you got that right. I just meant to get you started. How big is your garden?”
“Maybe a third of an acre.”
The man whistled, shook his head, and then allowed himself a laugh that sounded a bit like a snort. “You’d need a hell of a lot more than two or three trees. You got to build a fortress with them, you know!”
“It was your idea.”
“I didn’t realize your garden was . . . was a farm.”
“It’s not a farm.”
“You hunt?”
“No.”
“I was going to say if you started—”
“I don’t hunt. I don’t even eat meat. I work for FERAL.”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of FERAL. You’re the folks who hate dairy farmers, right?”
“We don’t hate dairy farmers. Why would you think such a thing?”
“My nephew’s in college, and one year he and his roommate had this poster on their wall. It said something like ‘You don’t have to milk barley and hops.’ It was a picture of a giant hop, and it had all these suction tubes and—”
“I know the poster. The point wasn’t to say that anyone hates dairy farmers—”
“And wasn’t there some farmer in a leather mask? One of those creepy executioner’s S-and-M hoods you see in . . . well, you know, you see some places?”
“No!”
“Oh.”
“There was one very stylized photograph of some natural barley being treated like a dairy cow,” Spencer told him, struggling to keep his voice even. He remembered well the fallout from the “Milk Is Cruel Food” disaster. It had kicked off late summer, almost two years ago now, and its purpose was to educate college students—huge milk drinkers—about the inhumanity of the corporate dairy industry. The vacuum pumps that were attached to the cows’ udders, the male calves that were sent away to be slaughtered. The shadowy growth hormones that increased production.
“Because you wanted the college kids to drink beer instead of milk, right?” the nursery’s owner asked.
“The point was simply to educate them that cows are mistreated, and when they drink milk—which is actually so bad for you that if I had my way my own daughter wouldn’t drink it—they’re supporting animal torture,” he answered. The result of the campaign had been angry letters from practically every mother and father who had ever lost a son or daughter to a drunk college-aged driver, as well as mountains—no, mountain ranges—of bad publicity for FERAL. Spencer had wound up on Nightline, enduring a withering battery of statistics from a representative from MADD about the numbers of people in this country who were killed or maimed every year by drunk drivers. On one syndicated radio talk show a woman had called him the Antichrist, and (her voice breaking) informed him that her beautiful vegan, non-milk-drinking FERAL member daughter had drowned diving amid the coral reefs of Grand Cayman when the girl’s boyfriend (drunk on beer) had improperly attached her regulator to her oxygen tank.
“Anyway,” Spencer continued now, drawing a long breath, “I’m not about to shoot a deer.”
“Or have much of a garden, I just guess.” The owner was grinning mischievously when he spoke, and Spencer could see that the moment he had told the man he worked for FERAL, the fellow had written him off as a fanatic. This happened all the time, and it drove him crazy. He was an activist, he believed, but he wasn’t an extremist. And if anyone wanted to talk about killing animals, the reality was that for better or worse he had finished off a great many more animals than most people you met on the street. One December evening when he was driving home from college with a friend for the winter break, he had tried to calculate in his mind the number of lobsters he had cleavered the previous summer by multiplying the average figure he killed in a night by the number of nights he had been the second chef at the Steer by the Shore. The bus tours, he understood, were what made him a statistical killing machine, and he guessed there were two of those each week. Those evenings he might have baked and stuffed as many as seventy lobsters. The other nights he presumed he killed about five an hour, and maybe twenty all told.
Still, he was able to come up with a figure that he supposed was a pretty good ballpark: 2,200.
That same car ride he had also calculated the pounds of ground beef he had consumed as a freshman, since he had eaten two cheeseburgers a day for lunch seven days a week and at least another six or seven either at dinner or at the snack bar when he was tired of the library late at night. At the time he didn’t know exactly how much a cow weighed, but he guessed at a quarter pound per burger he’d eaten all the meat off at least one steer that school year.
As he sped from the garden center’s parking lot, it didn’t seem fair that it was actually animals that were keeping him from his vegetables. It was as if the deer had known the exact day he was coming and descended on the garden literally hours before he arrived. He was quite sure that his family—John and Sara and his mother-in-law, perhaps even Catherine—was secretly laughing at him.
He decided the first thing he would do when he got to the club was grab a swim with his daughter. Spend some time with Charlotte and Willow, the two people who would be least likely to see any humor in the way a couple of deer had undone his big plans. He knew he wouldn’t dare say a word to Catherine, because although she had absolutely nothing to do with this debacle, he would be unable to speak of his experience at the nursery just now without sounding as if he were furious with her. Taking his disappointment out on her. Which, obviously, he wasn’t. But, still, Catherine would get defensive. And he would grow sarcastic. And either they would stew separately or they would squabble together. He didn’t want that, not here.
Maybe when he’d calmed down he would see if John wanted to play nine holes of golf.
Then, when he was more serene at the end of the day, perhaps he could get in a game of doubles with Catherine and Sara and John. He’d be so tired by nightfall that he wouldn’t care—or, at least, he wouldn’t care quite so much—that the greens he would eat this coming week wouldn’t come from the seeds he had planted back in May.
As he drove past Gerta’s Edelweiss Garden (the Steer by the Shore was long gone, replaced by a store that sold home medical equipment), he decided that what he actually found most disturbing was the notion that even a guy with tattoos of flowers on his arms thought he was a kook because he didn’t want to bring down a couple of deer—in season or out—with an assault rifle.