My father taught me chess on a board with a missing black queen. Her stand-in was a coat button he'd painted over with shoe polish, and to this day I look for that button whenever I sit down at a board that isn't mine. I hadn't sat down at any board in thirty years when Mia pulled hers out of her backpack. It was paper, folded in quarters, with a crease running through d4 that made the square look cracked.
She's eleven. Since her grandmother died in the spring, her mother has kept driving her over on Thursdays anyway, and for three weeks the two of us had been letting the television do the talking. That afternoon she pressed both palms flat on the paper like she was keeping it from flying off the table, and I kept my hands wrapped around my mug. The coffee went cold somewhere between her first sentence and my second.
She said pawn the way you say a word you learned from a book before you ever heard it spoken, the a running a little long. She rested a finger on top of each one for half a second before she trusted its square. The rook she called a castle, caught herself, said rook, and looked up at me. I was watching her mouth work through it, not the board. A bus went by outside, the paper shifted under her wrist, and she flattened it without looking down.
Her knight went straight across, two squares, clean and wrong. Before my finger could lift, she had already walked it back to its corner, her palm resting on the horse's head a moment longer than it needed to. She didn't look at me. The mug was somewhere behind my elbow and I let it stay there. A pigeon landed on the sill and left, and neither of us said a word about the knight.
The Bishop, Off the Board
A few Thursdays in, I left a bishop sitting on e5 the way you leave your keys on the edge of a counter. Mia's hand started toward it and stopped, started again, and she looked up at me the way you check a door twice before you believe it's unlocked. My face didn't do anything, because for once I wasn't managing it. She lifted the bishop with two fingers and set it on the wood beside the paper, and the click it made was the loudest sound that room had produced since the funeral. Her eyes went straight back to the board.
When my position fell apart for good, I reached over and laid my king on its side, the plastic cool under two fingers. Her exhale came out in one short push through her nose, like she'd been holding it since the bishop came off. Then she reached across and stood the king back up. We were setting up the next game before I understood that was what the gesture meant. She slid the board an inch toward me, then an inch toward herself, until the crease at d4 sat between us like a seam, and her fingers found her pawns and lined them along the second rank without counting, the way a person straightens silverware they've straightened a thousand times. Mine went to the corner where my father's coat button would have stood, rested there a moment, and then we both reached for the rooks.
By December the paper had a second crease, parallel to the first, from being slid back and forth enough times that the fibers gave. The afternoon light came in low and the pieces threw shadows longer than themselves, the knight's shadow reaching nearly to the seam. I set my mug down on the far side of the board from where I'd have set it a month before. I noticed myself doing it and didn't change it back.
The Clock
She brought a real board next, cardboard with a thin wood veneer bubbled up at one corner, and set it on the table before she'd taken off her coat. The pieces were plastic, cream and brown, and the brown queen stood taller than she should have, a stray from some other set that somebody had used to fill out the box. I noticed her the way you notice a song played in the wrong key, and said nothing, and so did Mia. She hung her coat on the chair beside her instead of the hook by the door where she'd hung it for eleven years. Her cocoa was already on her side of the table when she sat down. I had turned the handle toward the board without thinking about it.
In February the brown queen was still too tall, and Mia had started resting her chin on her fist the way I did at her age, which I kept to myself. She took my knight with a pawn and didn't celebrate. She just moved the piece to a small pile at her left elbow, in the spot where the salt shaker usually sat, and the salt shaker had somehow ended up over by the stove without either of us carrying it there. I hung my hand above my bishop for a long time, long enough for the radiator to click twice and quit, and she waited without filling the silence, which is a thing she had not always known how to do. When I finally moved, and moved badly, she made a low sound in her throat, a word she'd decided against, and I found I was glad she'd kept it in. The captured knight lay on its side by the salt shaker's ghost, face toward the window, and when the table shook it rolled a half-inch, the way my father's coat button used to roll for the edge of whatever it landed on.
Then came the clock, a small one with two buttons on top. She set it beside the board without explaining it, and I looked at it the way I look at a word in a language I almost speak. She showed me once: move, then press your button, her palm coming off it flat and deliberate. I pressed mine too slowly. She corrected me without touching my hand, just pressed her own button again and watched me until I got it. Later that afternoon the clock ran on my time while I stared at a position that had no good answer in it, and she didn't sigh, and the radiator knocked once against the wall. I moved the wrong rook. She hit her button before my fingers had left the piece. I sat back and looked at the number counting down that I hadn't known was counting, and she reached over and reset it with both thumbs, the little case light in her hands, and put it back between us, on my side of the seam.
We still don't talk much on Thursdays. But the silence used to be the kind you fall into, and now it is the kind you build, move by move, with somebody who will stand your king back up without being asked. Her grandmother would have been unbearable about it. She would also have been right.
