I lifted them out, saw what lay beneath, and my whole body went cold.
Under the felt was a thick fold of brokerage statements. I didn’t understand them at first — then I saw the company name across the top, and my breath stopped. It was the game company. The one I’d babbled to Grandpa about when I was sixteen, sitting at this very board, going on and on about a little studio that made the games I loved, certain it was going to be huge. Everyone else told me to shut up about my games. Grandpa listened. And the next morning, it turned out, he’d quietly bought in.
He’d held the shares for fifteen years. They had split and climbed and split again. The total at the bottom of the last page was larger than the land my uncles got and the money my aunts took, all of it together. The “wasted” boy’s wasted obsession had made my grandfather a small fortune — and every share of it was in my name.
Tucked under the statements was a little spiral notebook, soft with handling. Inside, in his shaky pencil, was the score of every checkers game we’d ever played. A thousand nights, tallied. The last entry was dated the week before he died.
And folded into the back cover, the letter.
“Kid — your family thinks your games rotted your brain. I sat across this board from you for twenty years, and I watched that brain see things coming that nobody else could. You told me about that little game company like a man describing the future. So I bet on it. I bet on you, really. You were right. You were right about all of it, and I’m the only one who ever bothered to listen long enough to find out.”
I had to put the board down to keep reading.
“They were always too busy to come. You moved in and wiped my chin and never once complained. So the gamer gets more than a checkerboard. The gamer gets everything his own mind earned while the rest of them were rolling their eyes. Don’t you ever let a soul tell you what you love is worthless. What you love bought your future, and your grandfather got to watch it happen from a folding chair across this board.”
And the last line, underlined twice.
“Your uncle said try a real game for once. Son, you were playing the long game the whole time. You just won it. Final score’s in the notebook — you, by a landslide.”
That worn checkerboard sits open on my desk now, the notebook beside it. They laughed that the gamer got the yard-sale leftover. They never knew the only man who ever listened to me had turned my “wasted life” into the richest inheritance in the family.