CHAPTER EIGHT
Checkers by the Stove
By the second evening, the pavilion had settled into a rhythm that felt, against all odds, almost peaceful, the wind still howling steady against the windows but the room itself gone hushed and warm in the particular way a crowded space could once everyone inside it had stopped straining against the strangeness of it and simply let themselves rest, and I found Walt and Theo and Everett Boyle clustered around the same low table where Everett had set his checkerboard that afternoon, the game apparently having stretched itself into a running tournament that showed no signs of concluding anytime soon.
"Best two out of three," Walt was saying, studying the board with the deep, theatrical seriousness he brought to every game he played with his grandson, "though I'll warn you both now, I've been playing this specific game since before either of your parents were born, so don't expect much mercy."
"You lost the last one," Theo pointed out, not looking up from his own careful study of the board.
"That was a strategic sacrifice."
"It was a bad move," Everett said, gentle, a smile tucking into the corner of his mouth, and Walt laughed, easy and unbothered, clapping the older man on the shoulder with the particular warmth of two men who had, over the course of a single crowded day, discovered an easy, comfortable friendship neither had gone looking for.
I pulled up a bench nearby, close enough to watch without intruding, and found myself charmed, the way I so often was these past couple of days, by the sight of Everett Boyle settled among my family as easily as if he'd always belonged there.
He played with a patient, deliberate style, considering each move a long moment before committing to it, and he had, I noticed, a habit of narrating small pieces of his own thinking aloud for Theo's benefit, not in a way that felt like teaching so much as simply thinking out loud in good company.
"You want to always be thinking two moves past the one you're making," he told Theo, sliding a piece forward with cautious consideration. "Anybody can see the move in front of them. The trick is seeing the one after that, and the one after that, before you've committed to anything."
"That's what Denny says about the weather," Theo said, solemn. "Watch two things ahead, not just the one thing you're looking at."
"Denny sounds like a wise man."
"He mostly is. Sometimes he's wrong about the weather, though."
"Everybody's wrong about the weather sometimes," Everett said, with the certain gentle humor of a man who had clearly lived long enough to be wrong about a great many things and made his peace with it. "It's one of the few subjects where being wrong doesn't much reflect on your character."
Walt lost the second game with considerably more grace than the first, and while Theo reset the board for a third round, arranging each piece with tremendous care, Everett leaned back in his chair and looked around the crowded, firelit pavilion with an expression I couldn't quite name, some part of it warm and a little wistful both at once.
"You've got a good thing here," he said, quiet, mostly to Walt. "This whole place. A family this size, gathered up together even in weather like this. Not every family would manage it without someone coming to blows by the second day."
"We've had our moments," Walt admitted, easy. "But yes. It's a good thing. Took me a long while to build it, longer still to trust I'd actually managed it and it wasn't going to come apart on me the moment I looked away."
"I understand that better than you might guess.
" Everett's gaze drifted, briefly, toward the window, toward the dark and the snow still churning past it, and something still passed over his face, there and gone again so fast I might have imagined it if I hadn't been watching closely.
"My wife and I never had children of our own.
Wanted to, for years, and then simply didn't, the way life sometimes decides these things without asking your opinion on the matter.
We made our peace with it eventually. Built a good life anyway, just the two of us, forty one years of it.
" He said the number plain, without particular weight, though something in the careful way he held it told me it cost him a piece of it small each time he did.
"That's a long marriage," Walt said, gentle.
"It didn't feel long, living it. Felt like no time at all, most days.
" Everett's hands settled still on the tabletop a moment, and I watched him gather himself, quiet and deliberate, before continuing.
"She's been gone two years now. I still catch myself, some mornings, reaching for a second coffee cup before I remember there's only the one of me to pour for these days. "
Theo, who had gone very still over the checkerboard, looked up at him with the specific grave attention children sometimes gave to grief they didn't fully understand but recognized as important regardless. "Is that why you came here for the winter? So you wouldn't be by yourself?"
"Something like that, yes." Everett smiled at him, warm despite the sadness still sitting soft behind it.
"A house gets very loud with quiet, if you understand me.
All that empty space where two people's worth of noise used to be.
I found I did better somewhere with people about, even strangers, even in weather like this.
Better a full pavilion in a storm than an empty house with nothing but the furnace for company. "
"I'm glad you came here, then," Theo said, with the plain, uncomplicated sincerity only a ten year old could manage, and Everett's entire face softened at it, something in his eyes going bright and a little unsteady for a moment before he blinked it back and reached out to ruffle Theo's hair, the same easy gesture I'd seen Walt make a thousand times.
"So am I," Everett said, hushed. "So am I, young man."
They played the third game slower than the first two, Everett drawing it out with small stories along the way, tales of a fishing trip gone comically wrong somewhere up in the mountains decades back, a dog he and his wife had once owned who'd developed a bizarre and permanent fear of the vacuum cleaner, the particular small, warm history of a whole life lived carefully and well, and I found myself, listening from my bench a little apart from the game, thinking that there was some part of it in Everett Boyle's quiet, easy grief that felt entirely unlike the sharp, unresolved grief still tangled up in my own family's history, something settled and full even in its sadness, a man who had loved deeply and lost deeply and made, somehow, a genuine peace with carrying both those things together for the rest of his days.
"You're very good with him," I told Everett later, once Theo had finally been persuaded off to bed and Walt had wandered off toward the kitchen end of the pavilion in search of a late cup of tea.
"He's an easy boy to be good with. Curious, thoughtful, asks the kind of questions most children learn to stop asking somewhere around his age, and most adults never quite manage to start asking again.
" Everett began gathering the checkers pieces into their worn wooden box, unhurried, deliberate with each one.
"I had a nephew, once, a good deal like him.
My sister's boy. He passed young, an accident, a long time ago now.
I don't often let myself think about it, but your Theo's got something of the same spark in him.
Made for a good evening, being reminded of it in a happier context, for once. "
"I'm sorry. About your nephew."
"It was a long time ago," Everett said, gentle, closing the box's lid.
"Grief gets easier to carry, if you carry it long enough and honestly enough.
Doesn't get lighter, exactly. You just get stronger for having carried it so long.
" He looked at me a moment, a piece of it still and searching in his expression, as though weighing whether to say something more, and then simply smiled instead, small and warm.
"Thank you for having me here, Josie. Truly.
I don't think you know quite how much it means, an old man finding himself somewhere warm and full of good people, right when he needed it most."
"We're glad to have you," I told him, and meant it completely.
Before he turned in for the night, Everett paused a moment longer by the window, looking out at the snow still sifting steady past the glass, and I lingered there beside him, in no certain hurry to end the evening either. "Can I ask you something, Mr. Boyle?"
"Everett, please. And you may ask me most anything. I've found, at my age, there's very little left worth being cagey about."
"You said this winter, specifically, you decided to come stay somewhere with people. Was there a reason it was this winter, and not last, or the one before?"
Some part of it flickered across his face, quick and careful, the particular guarded stillness of a man weighing precisely how much of an answer a question deserved.
"I suppose I eventually felt ready," he said, after a moment, choosing the words with visible care.
"There's a difference between grieving and simply being frozen by it.
I spent the first year mostly frozen. The second, I began to think there were things I still owed people, promises made a long while back that I hadn't found the courage to see through yet.
I decided, come this winter, I'd stop putting it off.
" He smiled at me then, gentle and a little sad and entirely unreadable, the smile of a man carrying something he wasn't yet prepared to set down in front of company, however kind that company had been to him.
"I'm still working up to it, if I'm honest. But I mean to see it through before the season's out. "
"Whatever it is," I told him, not quite understanding what I was responding to but sensing, somehow, that it mattered, "I hope you get the chance."
"So do I," he said, quiet, and something in his voice carried a weight I couldn't place, and then the moment passed, easy as it had come, and he wished me a good night and made his way toward his own cot near the far stove, an unhurried, dignified figure moving through a room gone soft and settled for the night, and had no way of knowing, watching him go, that I'd just spent one of the last easy, ordinary evenings I would ever get to spend in his company, or that whatever quiet promise he'd been working up the courage to finally keep would end up changing everything the rest of us thought we understood about Idella Marsh.