Queen Move

“If I ask you a question, will you answer honestly?”

“Always.”

“Did I ever even really have a chance?”

I give the question the consideration it deserves and force myself to be honest with her while still being as kind as I can. “Probably the best chance anyone has ever had. If you’d said yes when I asked to marry you, I would have found a way to keep my distance from Kimba when our paths crossed again.”

“You couldn’t have just been friends?”

I glance past her toward the kitchen, the mudroom, and flash back to that night when Kimba and I first made love. The wild sounds we made. The desperate craving that hung in the air. That absolute long-sought rightness of being inside her for the first time.

“No, I don’t think I could have been just her friend, even though I fooled myself that I could have.”

“When did you fall in love with her?”

I feel the cold metal around my finger again. Smell the freshly cut grass in my back yard. Hear the glass breaking on the rocks.

“I was six years old.” I chuckle humorlessly and touch my empty ring finger. “And again when I was seven. Eight. Nine and ten. I think I fell in love with her every day for the first thirteen years of my life, and as soon as I saw her again, my heart just remembered.”

She watches me, her face pinched, but some semblance of acceptance finally entering her eyes. My cell phone buzzes on the desk, breaking the poignant, painful mood.

“My appointment is tomorrow,” Aiko says, turning to leave. “First thing.”

I check the screen and answer right away. “Mom, hey.”

“Hey! You said you needed to speak with me urgently. Is everything okay?”

“Yes, it’s quite urgent. If you ever checked your messages, you’d know when your son needs you. Noah told you to call?”

“When would I have talked to Noah?” she hedges.

“Okay. Never mind. I’ll deal with that later. I have a question for you.”

“All right.” Even though she says it, I hear the caution in her voice.

“Did you ever visit the Allens’ lake house?”

The question drops into a pool of silence so deep I almost lose track of it.

“Mom? Did you hear—”

“I heard you. I…why would you ask me that?” Caution becomes evasion.

“I don’t remember us

ever going with them up there. Kimba’s grandfather bought it not too long before we left.”

“Yes, so why would you—”

“Your charm was there, Mom,” I cut in before she can find a way to lie to me without telling me anything at all. “The star of David you lost that summer? Kimba and I went to the lake house and she found it in the laundry room.”

“What laundry room?” she asks and then gasps.

“Yeah,” I say, drawing out the word. “They just completed renovations that knocked out some walls and shuffled some things. The laundry room wouldn’t have been there…when you were.”

She releases a long, tired sigh on the other end of the line.

“Nothing’s ever as it seems, Ezra,” she says, her words weary and cryptic.