Page 34 of Cut Off
I don’t want to do dishes. “You’ve got a deal.”
“Can I be black?”
I shrug. “You’re nine, you can be whatever color you want.”
“I’m black.”
I’m beaten in eighteen minutes.
Not “almost beaten.” Beaten. Checkmated. He pins my queen on move twelve, and I never recover. He plays without hesitation, his small finger on the top of each piece like he’s just nudging it into the place it was always going to go. When he says “checkmate” he doesn’t even look smug. He looks disappointed, like he was hoping it’d be more interesting.
“Okay,” I say, staring at the board. “You have a gift. Eli. And that’s not a compliment, it’s a diagnosis.”
He doesn’t say thanks as he sets up the board again.
We play three more times. I lose three more times. By the third game, I’m pretty sure he’s letting me last longer just to be polite.
The afternoon goes like that. We play. We watch a documentary about deep-sea fish that he chooses with authority. We make popcorn. He doesn’t open the Lego box, but he carries it back downstairs at one point and sets it on the coffee table near where Jonah usually sits, and I count that as a win.
By the time the sun starts to go down, I’ve thought about Mel exactly forty-seven times.
Eli and I watch Jonah’s game until bedtime. It’s the middle of the third period, and Trout are down by a point.
Bedtime is a negotiation.
“Three stories.” Eli holds up three fingers.
“Two.”
“Three.”
“You have your first day of school tomorrow.” I pat his hand. “Two and a half. The third one has to be short.”
“Three. And two night-lights.”
“Two night-lights, fine.” Why not? It’s not my electric bill?
“And the closet door open six inches.”
“Six inches?”
“Not five. Not seven. Six.”
“Eli, I don’t have a ruler.”
He gets a ruler.
I do every single thing on the list. Three stories. Two night-lights, one in the outlet by the door and one shaped like a crescent moon on the dresser. The closet door open exactly six inches, measured. He lies still under the covers, Flash on the pillow next to him, and I sit on the edge of the bed andwatch his eyes get heavy the way kids’ eyes do, in stages, like he’s powering down.
When his breathing evens out, I sit there a minute longer, because I can, because nobody’s making me leave, because the hole inside me wants to.
I tiptoe out and nearly walk straight into Jonah at the bottom of the stairs.
He looks worse than he did this morning, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. A duffel hangs over his shoulder. His hair is wet from a rink shower. His eyes are the eyes of a man who’s been hit by the second wave of trucks.
“Hi,” he whispers.
“Hi.”
