I lifted the flat thing out of the compartment under the board, and I sat down in his chair, and I had to stop, because it was a photograph of my grandmother, young and laughing over a chessboard, and with it a worn little notebook, and every page of that notebook was a game, dated, in two different hands. Hers and his.
I never knew my grandmother. She died long before I was born. And I had always been told my grandfather played chess against himself, turning the board around between moves, arguing both sides under his breath, a lonely old man habit. Sitting in his chair with that notebook in my hands, I understood that he had not been playing against himself at all.
He was not playing both sides. He was still playing her.
The notebook told the whole story. My grandmother had been the chess player, the real one, and for the years of their marriage the two of them had played nearly every evening at that little inlaid table by the window, and she had written down their games, move for move, in that worn book. Her hand and his, back and forth, page after page, a whole marriage recorded in chess games.
And when she died, he did not stop. He kept sitting at that table every evening, and he turned the board around between moves, and he played her side and then his side, the way they always had, so that she would still be sitting across from him. He argued both sides under his breath because one of those sides was hers, and he was keeping her voice in the room. For decades, every single night, my grandfather sat down and played chess with a woman who had been gone for fifty years, just to have her across the table again.
He tried to teach me a hundred times. I was too impatient, too young, and I never sat down long enough to learn. I would give anything now to take that seat across from him, and I never understood, until that notebook, why it mattered so much to him that someone sit there. He was trying to give me the thing he had lost. A person across the board.
I am learning chess now, too late for him, but not too late. I sit at his table by the window in the evenings, and I play through the games in that notebook, hers and his, move by move, and it is a little like sitting down across from both of them at last. He played her for fifty years so he would not be alone. The least I can do is learn the game, and keep two old sweethearts company, one evening at a time.