your mother’s ring is in the flour tin. don’t let your brother in the house. i’m going to try to drive myself, if i can’t finish this you’ll know why. All lowercase, no capitals anywhere, no punctuation at the end, the cursor still blinking in the box when my aunt found it. He’d been typing it and stopped partway through and gone out to the car. The reason he stopped, we found out two days later, is that by that point he could no longer see the right-hand side of the keyboard.
He’d had a stroke sometime Monday night. He drove eleven miles to the county hospital by himself at four in the morning and did not tell one living person he was going, because he’s seventy-eight and belongs to a generation that considers a phone call before dawn a form of bad manners. He parked in the visitor lot and walked in through the main doors and told the woman at the desk he thought something might be the matter. My aunt found him at ten that night on the second floor, mildly annoyed about the food and asking whether anybody had thought to lock his back door.
The chess move was deliberate. He told me the following week, slowly, that he’d known something was wrong on Monday evening — he’d dropped a cup and then dropped it again — and he’d thought about calling me and hadn’t, because what would he have said. So in the morning he sat down and made the worst move he could think of instead. The one piece he never touches, into a square with no logic in it whatsoever. He said he’d wanted something I would look at for more than a second. Six years of careful, cautious play, and he spent all of it building up the one thing that would make a single careless move unmistakable.
He’s home now. The speech came back nearly all the way, the left hand is stubborn and he’s rude about the exercises, and my aunt has put a chart on his refrigerator that he resents more than the stroke. The ring was exactly where he said it was. My brother is a conversation we haven’t had yet and I can feel it out there waiting. And the game is still open — he moved Tuesday at 7:40 in the morning, a bishop, cautious and sensible and precisely what I’d have expected from him in 2019. I sat on the edge of my bed looking at it on my phone for a long while before I moved back.
