Tuesday 6:45 P.M.
Turner called Ben, who reported that Brian spent the time after baseball practice reading a book and texting his friends. The eighteen-year-old had hovered around the kitchen and offered to oil Jeff’s wheelchair. “No snark. He ate a slightly bigger than normal dinner, but he said he also worked out in the gym at school for an extra hour. I asked him if everything was okay. He said it was.”
“Jeff?”
“Stopped burbling about having a hero for a brother when he saw that Brian wasn’t responding. Brian wasn’t mean, and you know how Jeff can be a little slow on picking up social cues, but he caught on to his brother’s reluctance, and to his credit didn’t press it. He spent the time after school improving, I think, a triple helix for that chess game he’s been trying to create for months. At the moment, I think he and Ardis are on what might very loosely be defined as being on a date.”
“A date?”
“They’re playing chess in the living room.”
Turner was never sure what got his younger son into trying to invent a new way to play chess, or a whole new game. Paul didn’t think Jeff really knew which, but it took up hours of quiet work. Quiet work from kids was a good thing so he never pressed it. Since Jeff had been working on it, he had made no attempts to indulge in noisome, odiferous science experiments. It wasn’t that Paul didn’t appreciate his son’s intellectual scientific pursuits, but he didn’t want his kitchen destroyed in the likely pursuit of the impossible. He wondered if Jeff even considered what he and Ardis were doing as a date. Jeff could be as mercurial in his emotions an any teenager. Paul and his husband exchanged endearments and rang off.