Page 92 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

Penny guides me to the chair across from Gil and spins the chessboard. “Maybe you can be white, Providence,” she says. “White goes first, doesn’t it?”

“That sounds good to me,” Gil says.

As she leaves, Penny turns on the radio. A staticky country station bleats at us from the corner.

“You should move this one.” Gil taps the queen’s pawn. His smile warms my face like the first ray of sun after a thunderstorm. “Got to control the center.”

I move the king’s pawn instead. “Maybe this one.”

“Remind me to teach you the Caro-Kann one of these days.”

“I already know it.”

“Who taught you?”

“You did, Mr. Crawford.”

He strokes his whiskered chin. “Bah. I’d remember if I did.”

“It was the summer with all the tornados,” I say. “You knew we didn’t have a storm cellar and you’d always wait for me to come before you closed it up.”

His laugh is empty. He knows something is wrong, something is missing, but he no longer has the faculties to identify the absence. The world is sharing a delightful joke, and he is on the outside looking in. “Between you and me, I always thought your dad was a prize idiot, not building a storm shelter all those years.”

My head snaps up at the past tense, the whisper of memory carried within. Now I see two versions of Gil. I see the Gil who hugged me on Christmas mornings, who cooked me macaroni and cheese with diced jalapenos mixed in on my birthday because it was my favorite thing for dinner, who taught me to play chess, who cheered me on at softball games when my parents were too drunk to attend—and then I see the Gil who crushed my mother’s bones, who tore the life from her body, who wept over something he knew was horrible but could not explain why. I wish I could force these two versions of Gil to fight to the death so one could prevail, and then I would know how to feel. Either I would hate him or I would love him. Nothing in between.

But there are not two versions of Gil. There is one man, one soul inhabiting the husk across the chessboard, and I love him and hate him in equal measure. The memories live on like a fruit rotted on its skin but still bright and juicy inside. In the end, this is all we have. People are only the tally of their memories.

“Can I ask you something serious, Mr. Crawford?”

He twirls a pawn between his fingers. “Shoot.”

“How come you always let me go home?”

“How do you mean?”

“The bruises. The welts. You saw them, but you always let me go home.”

He reaches for the wrong cheekbone. “Is it your face?”

By now I know it is fruitless to evoke memories. Gil’s memories are no more real than dreams, figments that disintegrate justas soon as they appear. And so, one last time, I join him in his distorted piece of reality. “He hit me with the Springfield again.”

“We should get you ice. I’ll—I’ll call Marjorie, have her get you an ice pack.”

I grab his arm as he stands. He is so frail that my fingers encircle his wrist, the carpentry calluses that once studded his palms sanded down to the sere skin of an old man. “I don’t want ice,” I say. “I just don’t want to go home.”

“You’ll stay for the night then.”

“No, Mr. Crawford. I don’t ever want to go home.”

“Oh, Providence,” he says, “I wish I could make that happen.”

A pinch in my throat. “There’s nothing stopping you from trying.”

“In a perfect world—”

“In a perfect world, my father doesn’t hit me when I make an error in a softball game.”

“You don’t deserve it,” he says.