Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian Page B

wrought-iron chair on the clubhouse deck by the dining room. His eyes reminded her of the pearly blue moonstones on the necklace Grandmother had given her for Christmas seven months ago, and his hair looked a bit like a baby chick’s. She had already finished her grilled cheese, but everyone else was still eating—except for Charlotte, who had never gotten to join them because Grandmother had refused to allow her to leave the pool area until she put on a T-shirt and shorts, and so the girl had been left to pout in the ladies’ cabana. Had been inside there at least half an hour now. It crossed Willow’s mind that it was possible Charlotte had snuck out and was actually watching the older teenagers sunbathe on the grassy hill just behind the tennis courts—she was probably sunbathing
with
those older kids, in fact—but she certainly wasn’t going to squeal on her cousin.
    Her parents and her grandmother were talking about a funeral Grandmother was going to attend tomorrow for Walter Durnip. Willow knew Mr. Durnip largely as a heavyset man who seemed to walk in slow motion back and forth along the first hole of the golf course, but as far as Willow could tell he never played. He wore Bermuda shorts, and he had veins on his legs that looked like the topographic relief map in her classroom of the rivers in the Amazon rain forest. Her dad seemed a little sad that Mr. Durnip was dead. Apparently he had known the man his whole life, and the man’s daughter had babysat him when he was a little boy.
    “Maybe I’ll join you, Mother,” her father said, referring to the funeral. Both he and her mother were eating tomatoes filled with salmon, and Willow found herself wishing the sheer rosiness of the fish had been hidden better by the mayonnaise and the dill. What was it Charlotte was always saying? It’s not meat, it’s flesh.
    “Oh, don’t even think of coming,” Grandmother began, shaking her head at her son and groaning. “You’re on a weekend vacation. And I just know the funeral is going to be long, and there will be people there who will feel they have the right to talk.”
    “It’s called a eulogy, Mother. Some people actually like to mourn.”
    “I don’t mean the minister. I mean regular people. These days, it seems, anyone who happens to be in the church for a funeral is invited to speak. I was at a funeral last summer—that nice Mrs. Knebel—and easily a dozen people thought they had something worth sharing.”
    “I gather you thought they were mistaken.”
    “That church has very poor ventilation. And they had too many hymns. When I die, I want my funeral to last no more than fifteen minutes, and absolutely no one is allowed to speak but you or your sister, and the minister—whoever it is then. And no hymns. Are we clear?”
    Her father took a long swallow of his iced tea and said, “We’re clear, Mother. Show tunes, yes; hymns, no.”
    “I’m serious. I want a nice, short funeral—especially if there’s sunshine. People should be outdoors.”
    Patrick burped and then smiled. His eyes were unblinking.
    “If you die in the summer, we’ll be sure to have the funeral here in New Hampshire and we’ll be sure to have it outside,” her mother said. “We could have it beside the new cutting garden.” The cutting garden was a living room–sized block of perennials they had planted between the spindly apple trees and the garage. It actually had been among the easier tasks they had tackled over Memorial Day Weekend, because most of the flowers—the bridal veil astilbe, the red English daisies, the moss pink, the Canada and the Carolina phlox—were in shin-tall buckets and merely needed to be transplanted into the soil that had been tilled before they arrived.
    “If you’d like—and you’ll need to let us know ahead of time, Nan—we could even rent a little arch made with lattice from one of those rent-anything places,” her mother continued, teasing. Sara was wearing sunglasses and holding