Etta sat on the rug drawing, and before her father left she handed him a picture of a bright blue cat.
“So you don’t forget to come back next week,” she said.
Weston folded the drawing with great care and tucked it into his jacket.
There was something almost unbearably poignant in the sight of a grown man — a man who argued cases for a living, who had out-maneuvered his own wife’s lawyers, who had built and nearly gotten away with an elaborate fraud — sitting on the floor of a small apartment losing repeatedly at chess to a thirteen-year-old and asking, each time, to play again.
Because the losing was the point, though Weston may not have fully known it.
Emmett had told him he would not let him win, and he meant it, and Weston understood that to ask for the game on any other terms — to let the boy see him expecting to be handed something, or to go easy in a way that condescended — would have failed the test completely.
So he sat, and he lost, and he asked for another game, and lost again, and the asking-for-another-game was the whole thing in miniature: a man with no right to expect anything, requesting only the chance to keep showing up and keep losing and keep being present, on his son’s terms, at his son’s table, by his son’s rules.
And Etta’s blue cat, pressed into his hand with so you don’t forget to come back — that was a test too, gentler and even harder to bear, a seven-year-old handing her father a string to tie around his finger because she did not trust his memory of her, because he had given her reason not to.
He folded it with great care because he understood, at last, what it was worth, and how nearly he had thrown away his right to receive it.
He had come with a chess set and an opening-strategy book, thinking he might need to be good at the game.
He had not understood, until he sat on that floor, that being good at the game was the last thing that mattered.
Losing gracefully, repeatedly, and coming back anyway — that was the only opening strategy that was going to work on the two people whose forgiveness he actually needed.
Chapter 24 — Showing Up
The months that followed were far from perfect.