"I'm just asking," said Liv, exactly like Oren's mother, and I laughed so hard I had to put my fork down.
After dinner, my father went to the cabinet in the den and took out the chess set, the way he does every Christmas Eve, the old walnut box with the brass hinges, and set it up on the coffee table in front of the tree. Thirty-one pieces of pale and dark maple carved in a fishing cabin in 1961, worn smooth by sixty years of hands. And one rusty lug nut. He set it down on the knight's square with a little clink, the way he always did, and then he stopped and looked at Torben.
Torben reached into his pocket and took out the white knight and put it on the board beside the lug nut. My father picked it up. He held it a long time. He looked at me across the room, and then he put the knight down on g1, where it belonged, and picked up the lug nut and held it in his palm and closed his fingers over it.
"Well," my father said. His voice was not steady. "Well. I suppose that's retired."
"Give it here," Torben said. "I'm keeping it."
"What for?"
"Because it held the spot," said Torben, and put the lug nut in his shirt pocket, over his heart, and buttoned the pocket shut.
Then he looked at me. "You play white tonight," he said. "Dad can wait a year."
We played until eleven-thirty. He beat me in forty-one moves. I'm fairly sure, about halfway through, he could have beaten me in thirty, and didn't, and pretended he hadn't. I did not say anything about it. Some debts you let stand.
At seven-twelve on Christmas morning, in my old bedroom under the eaves with the glow-in-the-dark stars still on the ceiling, my phone buzzed. Off shift. Grinch guy is doing great, extubated at 4. How did it go?
I wrote: He opened the door.
The three dots appeared and disappeared and appeared. Then: And did you say the right thing?
I said a thing, I wrote. I think it was close enough. He beat me at chess. He let me win the middle part.