Speed chess on the street and twenty dollars on the line.
I was staring at the board, trying to stay focused on the two moves remaining to trap my opponent’s unprotected white king and win that twenty dollars.
I didn’t want to look up from the board. The dude had a monstrous pimple on the end of his nose that was so close to popping, the pressure must have been like a bee sting. How could he not be aware of it? Or did he look in the mirror and say, Yeah, why not draw attention away from the grease stains on my shirt?
The only difference between taking that twenty and swiping a lollipop from a toddler was that the dude across from me actually believed he had a chance of keeping his money and walking away with mine.
He hit the clock. I moved a piece and hit the clock. He wasted thirty seconds in panic, wasted another thirty seconds thinking he could actually escape, made a move, then hit the clock.
It’s not that I’m good in the way chess champions are good. In hockey terms, I’m like a ten-year-old with some skills. The real chess champions are destined for the NHL.
But we humans tend to fool ourselves with inflated estimates of our abilities. The real chess players—the pros—would have wiped me off the board in minutes. But Pimple Nose hadn’t even learned to tie his skates.
Add the pressure of playing against the clock. Make a move, hit the clock, force the other player into hearing the seconds count down on his end. Run out of time, lose the game.
Time and again, people who had been playing chess at home for a few years thought they knew it well enough to snap up the two twenties under a rock on the table. Those were the stakes I offered. Win, you get forty. Lose, I get twenty. But I didn’t lose often, so in this touristy area I cleared a couple hundred bucks most days.
With time clicking away, I swooped in with my queen, hit the clock and announced “Checkmate.” I took his twenty and let my gaze slide past his nose and over his shoulder as he gave a rueful shrug.
That’s when I saw Jennie Lang, holding a Starbucks cup and threading her way down the crowded sidewalk.
“Better luck next time,” I said to Pimple Nose.
He took the hint, scraped his chair back and left me alone.
I tucked the bills into my pocket and folded up the chessboard. The table was empty by the time Jennie arrived.
She set her cup on the table and set her face into a granite look of displeasure.
“We weren’t clear enough last night that we want you out of our lives?” she said.
“I’m doing fine,” I replied. “That last punch across the head didn’t hurt at all. Thanks for asking.”
“I’m only here because you said you had news about Elias.”
“Thought you might want to know where he is,” I said.
“That’s not why I showed up.”
“No?”
She lifted her cup for a quick and angry sip, then set it down again.
“I’m here to tell you one last time to stay out of our lives. Victor and I don’t give a crap about Elias. He’s the freaky half brother we’ve never liked. It took years, but Victor and I finally managed to drive him out of the house.”
“Harsh.”
“Not as harsh as my mom. She’s always hated him too. Evidence of an affair that broke up our so-called happy family.”
I tried doing the chronology. “But you and Victor were born after—”
“My father said he struggled with it for years. Not wanting to do a paternity test because he didn’t want to find out. Victor was three when they split up.”
I supposed the odds weren’t that crazy. Plenty of husbands and wives had affairs. Except in this case, Elias had been conceived not as the result of an affair but by a different woman during the same time that Jennie’s mother, Melanie, happened to have been having an affair. Since Melanie was my birth mother, did I owe her the truth?
I was messed up about this. One thing I did know for sure was that how Jennie and Victor had treated their brother, blood or not, was disgusting. They were mean and vicious people. I had no desire to be a part of their lives.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” I repeated. “I’m out of your lives.”
She left the coffee cup on the table for me to throw in the trash.