Read Before You Know Kindness for Free Online

idea, it was going to come from her daughter and her son-in-law. They were both not merely vegetarians, they were animal rights activists—Spencer professionally, Catherine as a reasonably enthusiastic amateur. Spencer, in fact, was something even worse than a vegetarian: He was a vegan, a word that sounded vaguely anatomic in Nan’s mind and therefore caused her a slight, unpleasant shudder whenever she heard it. Spencer’s peculiarity meant that she couldn’t even serve something as comfortably plebian as macaroni and cheese when he was visiting, because one of its two signature ingredients was made with milk and milk came from cows. It was ridiculous, in her opinion, completely ridiculous. Thank God Catherine still allowed milk and yogurt and cheese to be part of her and Charlotte’s diet.
    Nevertheless, Spencer was the communications director for FERAL, a lobbying group that championed animal causes, and when he wasn’t jetting to Washington to argue against things that seemed harmless to normal people—state dairy compacts and pet stores that sold tropical birds—he was meeting with magazine editors and appearing on TV shows defending positions that more times than not completely befuddled her. Why in heaven’s name was it better for college students to drink beer than milk? Who really cared if wing tips or a wallet were made of leather: What were people supposed to do, wear plastic dress shoes? Keep their credit cards packed together in their pockets or purses with elastic bands?
    And while Nan thought chimpanzees were cute and she understood that they were considerably smarter than, say, squirrels, she found her eyes glazing when Spencer would go on and on about the need to extend legal rights to chimps and gorillas and dolphins.
    She knew that the
A
and the
L
in FERAL stood for animal liberation, and that
FER
stood for Federation. The group’s official name was the Federation for Animal Liberation. This meant, in her opinion, that the acronym should more properly be FEDAL, since the first three letters of
federation
were
FED.
Or, perhaps, they could use the first five letters of
federation
and call themselves FEDERAL. She thought that had a nice historical ring to it. But FERAL? It made them sound like they were a bunch of wild animals, and what could possibly be the point of
that?
Still, she did like the way their letterhead and their magazine and even some of their T-shirts had a portion of some poem by Ovid—though she did wish they’d chosen one that wasn’t quite so judgmental about “feasting on meat.”
    Spencer was not a particularly handsome man, even if, as Nan recalled, he had been a rather good-looking college boy. But he carried himself with the confidence of someone who was striking and tall and who knew it. You could see it (as she certainly had) when he was speaking before groups of people in libraries, local YMCAs, and even the larger, more urban Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. Moreover, he was so indefatigably self-assured about his positions on . . . well, on everything . . . and so facile with statistics and stories and seemingly relevant anecdotes that it was futile to argue with him. Nevertheless, Nan was often left wondering: Did anyone really care that Pythagoras was a vegetarian? Who, other than Spencer, even knew who the Manicheans were? The only reason the family even had this ridiculous vegetable garden was because it was easier to put the effort into the earth than into trying to talk Spencer out of it: Nan and her granddaughters were now weeding and watering more for his sake than for their own. Here in the country they accommodated his diet—his family’s diet—even if it put desperate strains on Nan’s admittedly limited creativity in the kitchen, they endured his monologues at dinner, and (yes) they gardened.
    But then, of course, there was that other Spencer—the gentle and loving and almost farcically good-natured man whose sincere consideration of animals made