Chapter 1 — Two Different Universes

I am seventy-eight years old now, and until just two years ago, I lived in the state-funded wing of our nursing home.

That means something specific, which people who have never been poor and old do not always understand.

It meant I shared a cramped room with a stranger.

It meant I ate soggy, institutional food off a plastic tray.

It meant I survived on a pension so small that every small pleasure had to be counted and rationed.

The state-funded wing is where they put the old people the world has decided are finished with, the ones with no money and no family to advocate for them, and it is a place designed to be endured rather than lived in.

Harrison lived in a different universe entirely, in the same building.

He occupied the VIP penthouse suite, six floors above my drafty room, a suite with a private chef, and around-the-clock nurses, and floor-to-ceiling windows, and Egyptian cotton sheets.

We existed at opposite ends of every measure by which our society sorts people: he was rich and I was poor, he was cared for and I was warehoused, he ate food prepared by a chef and I ate soup boiled to grey.

By every rule of how the world arranges itself, our two lives should never have touched at all.

We lived in the same building and might as well have lived on different planets.

And yet we met, Harrison and I, in the courtyard between our two worlds, and what grew between us in the two years that followed would turn out to be the strangest, and the saddest, and in the end the most redemptive story of both our long lives.

I did not know, meeting him, who he was.

I would not learn the truth until a week after I buried him, when his lawyer handed me an envelope sealed in red wax and told me, gently, to sit down.

Chapter 2 — The Chessboard Under the Oak

We met over a chessboard, in the courtyard, beneath an ancient oak tree whose branches spread wide over a green metal table.

I had always played chess, all my life, a habit I had carried since childhood, from a childhood I did not like to think about too closely, before the foster homes and the state care, when someone, I could never quite remember who, had first set the pieces in front of me.