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and said some pretty nasty
     things. She’d cried, telling me about it. I knew I was going to have to beat this guy up at some point. Or put in a decent
     attempt.
    Lana looked down at her fingernails, short, ragged and flecked with black rinds of nail polish. ‘Well, look,’ she said. ‘He
     told me later it was all subconscious fear, right? Because he doesn’t want to get me pregnant. Now it’s gonna be easy for
     him.’
    She flicked over a page of the Sears catalogue in front of her. The men’s underwear section. Sick little trap-door jolt, seeing
     these images here. I watched as she attacked them with a pair of scissors.

    I went straight to the Healeys’ from Lana’s house. Supper waited in Tupperware containers on the kitchen counter and my six-year-old
     friend Kyle was in the backyard, scaling a bank of lumpy crystalline snow. I dropped my winter coat over a chair. Everything
     out there was still melting, drip by drip, disintegrating in beads that caught the light.
    A square hardback book had been set on the table, next to a bowl piled with oranges and plums.
Chess for Children
. Jesus, this thing again. There was a copy in our house somewhere. Unless I’d burned it.
    ‘What do you think – is he old enough?’ I nearly jumped. Mrs Healey was standing in the doorway.
    ‘I know Kyle couldn’t get through the whole thing on his own yet,’ she said. ‘But if someone read it
to
him …’ An encouraging smile.
    ‘Sure. No problem.’
    ‘You can change to a story or something if he doesn’t like it. But maybe he will. Could even turn out to be a prodigy, huh?’
     She paced into the kitchen, smoothed a cloth across the spotless counter.
    We watched Kyle through the window as he filled a red plastic beach bucket with soot-tinged, leftover snow. I noticed he was
     using a fork. Mrs Healey sighed. The stained-glass animals suspended on the pane in front of us rattled in sympathy.
    After she’d left, I propped myself against the stove and started flipping through
Chess for Children
. The same cartoon figures smiled up at me, page after page of them.
Pawns are brave soldiers. Knights are clever. This game is fun!
    That’s the thing about a book. You can leave it for years but it’ll still be there, every detail perfect, waiting for you
     to come back.

    It was the only game Stanley and I ever played together, and I hated it. He’d taught me the rules when I was eight. I was
     all excited. I thought it would be fun. It wasn’t.
    ‘Think it through, Stephen,’ my father would say. ‘Take your time and think it through.’
    So I’d rock back and forth and look at my hands and pretend to be considering the board. Then I’d do the first thing that
     came into my head. And I’d lose, which always made me feel squashed and frustrated.
    ‘But I took your horse!’
    ‘I know. I sacrificed it.’ Grinning at me.
    Even losing at chess lacked a satisfying ending. Nobody ever captured the king. The point was to trap him, freeze him so that
     any move would be impossible. So he wouldn’t get killed and he wouldn’t be a prisoner. Instead he’d be stuck, looking out
     the palace window and realising it was all over, forever.
    Later I started to understand the whole idea behind defensive strategy, and that was even worse. I couldn’t make a move without
     anticipating how it would be punished. If I do this, he’ll do that. And then this and then that. Stanley would get bored waiting
     for me to move and wander off. When he was out of the room, I’d cheat.
    Would things have turned out differently if I’d been smarter? Better at games?

    My parents got married in February 1978. Stanley was in jeans and his white sweater from Peru. Mom wore a pink, fluttery dress
     with a flower pattern, too light for the cold. We drove to another town andthey signed some papers in a courthouse. Then we got back in the car and drove home. Stanley headed straight for his little
     study and the door banged shut behind him.