A car door squeaks as it opens nearby, pulling my attention away from the old men and their boards. A few feet away, a young woman, maybe midtwenties, sits in the driver’s side with a lapful of knitting, and she smiles at me. “You can go talk to them, you know,” she says. “They don’t bite. At least not with teeth.”
I’m not very good at smiling anymore—it comes off a little frightening—but I try to muster an appropriately friendly expression. “I didn’t want to intrude. Do they let others play with them?”
“Sometimes. They’re pretty particular about it, but it can’t hurt to ask. My grandfather’s up there.”
That explains the knitting. Thank God—a parking lot Madame Defarge would be pretty creepy.
“Go and ask,” she urges, her thumb absently petting the loops of red yarn around her pinky. “The worst they can do is say no.”
“You encourage everyone who stops and stares?”
“Just the ones who look lonely.” She closes the door before I have to come up with a response to that.
After a few more moments of standing there like an idiot, an ache building in all the parts of me that aren’t frozen through, I walk up onto the grass and into the mostly warm pavilion. The players all stop their games to stare at me.
Almost all the men are older, clearly veterans, based on the operation and unit designations on their hats. Chess parks are common places to find vets, so while I don’t know all the operations, I know enough to lump them into groups. Most of these guys served in Vietnam, a few in Korea, a couple in Desert Storm, and one very old man, bundled in scarves and blankets and seated nearest the space heaters, wears a hat with Operation Neptune embroidered on it, the thread faded to a weary mustard.
Holy shit.
This man stormed Normandy Beach before my grandparents were even born.
One of the Vietnam vets, a saggy, pouch-faced man with a bulbous, broken-veined nose that suggests chess may be the way he keeps himself from day-drinking, scowls at me. “We’re not looking for donations, girl.”
“Wasn’t offering any. I was going to ask if you allow others to play with you.”
“You play?” He doesn’t sound like he believes me.
“Badly, but yes. I look for a place to play wherever we move.”
“Huh. Thought that’s what you young people use the Internets for.”
“It isn’t the same.”
The oldest man clears his throat, and the others all turn to look at him. Every group has a hierarchy; groups of veterans are really no different, and actual rank aside, World War II trumps all. This man lived through hell and has carried its scars with him a lot longer than anyone else here. That kind of rank doesn’t retire or get discharged. “Come here, please.”
I walk around the table and perch on the tiny sliver of bench sticking out beside him. He studies me—for what, I’m not sure—and the sickly sweet smell of his breath makes me wonder if he’s diabetic, if he’s actually okay sitting out here in this weather, space heaters and layers aside. His skin looks parchment thin, folded over itself in soft wrinkles, unevenly discolored with age and wear and thin blue veins spider-webbing his temples and under his eyes. Thick, pale scar tissue knots around one temple, digging back over and behind that ear. Shrapnel from Normandy? Or something else entirely?
“You’ve got your own war, don’t you, girl?”
I think about that, letting the question beneath the words take shape. It takes the shape of Chavi, all that rage and sorrow and hurt I’ve carried since her death. “Yes,” I say eventually. “I just don’t know who’s on the other side of it.” A war needs an enemy, but I’m not sure anyone can sabotage me as well as I do myself.
“We’ve all wondered that a few times,” he agrees, his eyes flicking to the other men. All but one are watching us; the exception is studying his board with a faint frown and the dawning realization that his king’s about to be cornered. “What’s your name, then?”
“Priya Sravasti. Yours?”
“Harold Randolph.”
“Gunny!” Most of the men cough into their hands. Only one refrains, and he doesn’t look like a veteran. He’s younger, softer, and there’s something in his eyes—or rather, something not in his eyes—that says he doesn’t belong the way the rest of them do.
Gunny rolls his eyes. He slowly peels off a knit glove to reveal a second below, this one fingerless and a yellow as faded as the letters on his hat. His hand shakes slightly as he lifts it—a palsy, I think, more than cold—and he touches the tip of my nose with one finger. “Can you feel that?”
I almost smile, but I don’t want to scare him, make myself less welcome. “No, sir.”
“Then get on home for today, and come back whenever you want. We don’t play much on weekends. Too many folk.”
“Thank you, sir,” I tell him. Impulsively, I drop a kiss on his cheek, soft whiskers tickling my lips. “I’ll be back.”
The bulbous-nosed man snickers. “Look at that, Gunny’s got a new future ex-wife.”
Most of the others nod at me, acknowledgment rather than friendliness, but that’s okay. I have to earn a place here, show them I’m not just bored or flighty. I stand up and walk along the back of the pavilion, soaking in the warmth before I head home, and glance at the man at the far end of the tables, the one who doesn’t seem to belong. He’s not wearing a ball cap, just a knit cap pushed back far enough to show light-colored hair that’s impossible to describe as blond or brown.
He smiles blandly at me.
“You look familiar,” I blurt.
His smile doesn’t change. “I get that a lot.”
No shit. He doesn’t look like anyone, so he must look like nearly everyone. There isn’t a single distinguishing feature on him, nothing to say yes, I’d absolutely recognize him out of context. He isn’t handsome, he isn’t ugly, he just . . . is. Even his eyes are a murky, indistinguishable color.
And his smile doesn’t change the look of his face. It’s strange, that. Smiles change you, the tilt of your cheeks, the shape of your mouth, the crinkle around your eyes. But his face doesn’t look any different than it did before he smiled. It’s not that it looks fake exactly, it just doesn’t look . . . well, natural. But let’s be honest, chess parks are a haven for the socially awkward. Maybe I should just be impressed he’s making eye contact.
I nod, still feeling somewhat unsettled, and head home. I’m not feeling the cold as much, which is less a sign of the day warming up than a hey-idiot-get-inside-before-you-get-frostbite warning.
Once in the neighborhood, I stop at the large overhang sheltering the wall of mailboxes for our street. There’s even a trash can chained around one of the posts for all the junk mail. In my more sentimental moods, I miss our mailbox in Boston, with the brightly colored handprints across the cheerful yellow surface. Dad didn’t want to put his handprint—he thought it was undignified—so the three of us attacked him with paintbrushes and ended up with a beautiful multicolored moustache print on the front flap.
I wonder if we still have that box. I haven’t seen it in a couple of moves. Then again, that’s the case for at least half of everything we own—unpacking and packing again hasn’t seemed worth the effort.
I pull out a double handful of circulars and oversize postcards addressed to “Our Neighbor” and “The Residents of . . .” and flick them into the bin, along with the dental appointment reminder postcard forwarded from Birmingham. There’s a greeting-card envelope in a cheerful shade of green, a very spring kind of color, with Mercedes’s handwriting on the front. It’s not all that surprising; technically I start virtual school today, taking online classes with a tutor in France so I get used to thinking and working in another language, and Mercedes always has a card waiting for my first day of school, no matter how many there are in a year.
What’s surprising are the other two envelopes, nearly identical in size. One is labeled all in caps, the writing effortlessly neat and legible, the kind that holds up well even as the paper and ink start to fade, the black print stark against the hot-pink card stock. The pale blue envelope has a mostly tidy scrawl, readable after a blink or two.