Luciano's, 1pm by Jess Moody

I nudge the salt round the back of the pepper in a sneak attack. An illegal move. The cellars are glass, the black and white contents exposed. A single red carnation looks down at my antics, bemused. The waiter hovers; anxious about your empty chair in the lunch rush. It’s okay. I have learned that you require patience.

The waiter is getting too old to be called young. He knows it too. I recognise it in his hands, the fidget, not knowing what pose to present to the world. I was his age, when I found myself alone, at last, with you. Let’s be honest. You weren't really interested in me until the Knight. Trying to teach the game without its pieces was perhaps desperation on my part. But by then I'd kept you inside too long, cloistered in stale air. Housekeeping refused, day after day.

Eventually I took the risk: left my post at the gap in the curtains, and knelt down into your new world. A carpet square, a hastily gathered box of crayons and pens. I picked out the broken stubs of colour, wearing each other’s marks. Set them out in a row, and talked about pawns.

You stared me down. My irrelevance. Fair enough, I thought. No one cares about the little guy. I teased the green marker from your fingers and zoomed it in diagonals across the little table. Zap, zap – Space Bishops! You pouted and furrowed that four-year-old brow. Unimpressed. But your eyes followed the rumble of a crumbling eraser: straight up, down, right, left. A rare certainty.

‘Rook,’ I explained. ‘Or “Castle”’. A fortress was now an understandable thing.

I took up that red crayon: thick as your thumb, malformed from a season trapped behind somebody’s radiator.

‘Knight.’ I added some galloping for good measure. ‘Watch how she jumps.’

A leap – over the pawns (collateral damage) – crashing down, then reigns pulled in, the sideways lurch brought up sharply. You took it from me. A sly eye upwards, waiting on my nod. Then a soaring over the battle line, coming to a stop without showmanship.

‘Does she have armour?’

‘Sure!’ Relieved to hear your voice. ‘She’s strong.’

You carefully thumbed her scarred wax form.

‘But…’ I grinned, ‘she’s not the strongest.’ I rattled around in the box ‘til I found it - the royal blue marker: the one that kept bleeding through the paper onto every surface, your frustration staining the room.

‘The Queen,’ I announced. Your little hands reached out, but I held on stubbornly. Leaning down into your eye-line I spoke, the jolting thought of my mother in this moment between us. ‘She’s the most powerful piece on the board. She can go as far as she needs, so long as she never wanders. She must never wander.’

It was days until I judged it safe to go out to the park. Still early, and few people about.

‘Want to play tag?’ I'd asked, already jogging backwards across the daisied grass.

‘Queens,’ you said, standing firm. Fists down at your side. Pigtails of pride.

‘Queens, huh? Like in your stories or –’

‘Chess queens,’ you said.

So, we played chess in the park. Our territory nestled between the grassy slope and the ash from a furtive barbecue. You faced off against me, staring me down until the moment you charged – at me, or diagonally across to my right, or fierce short dashes to your side. I was never really sure of the rules, or the definition of the win: just that we each took our turn, and we laughed – God we finally laughed – yelling, ‘Check! Check!’

An old couple walking by slowed and shrugged and smiled. Without a thought, I made eye contact, grinned back. Joy overcoming vigilance.

Funny to think I thought the two of us were bonding. You really couldn’t have been clearer, could you?

~

I open my messages again, frowning at the screen in winter glare: the curse of the window seat. Still nothing, just that last suggestion from you. A place and a time.

Twelve months without a proper conversation, your laugh, your hand on my shoulder and hair on my cheek as you lean in, mmm, what’s cooking? The muted gap of you.

I used to be grateful for your stillness. How you could sit opposite in a café, colouring or reading without a flinch at the lie to the waitress about where we heading, where we’d come from, or why. Later, in each new school office, just the helpful nods from you as I painted a history in the squares of a form.

You watched me watch others, then took the shape I needed. I see that now. One day I blinked, and we’d arrived at a normal life. My job, your studies; hobbies plentiful, if not always playful. We let some people in, carefully, temporarily. Though I was pleased you followed my lead, kept the right amount of distance. No angst-ridden teen romances for you, though perhaps, I suspect, the odd carefully controlled liaison.

We moved around the house and each other steadily, playing our parts. I admit, I thought there was serenity there. A pattern that remained undisturbed. Not by a hasty whispered phone call, or the edge I kept on the bread knife: ready on the shelf by the back door.

Towards the end, another lapse. Coming into the room I had left unlocked to find you silent at my desk. Our birth certificates, passports, all laid out in regimented order for your appraisal. I watched your finger flow along the rails of the text and the thickness of the paper. A question in touch.

But you looked up and smiled. Offered to make tea. Walked past, kissing my cheek as you brushed by me at the threshold. Our eyes now level, our gazes an equal match. Suspicions passed like so many seasons.

~

Should I offer you that cheek when you come in? I’ve been watching the diners around me, the queue at the entrance. Faces warming faces, hands finding each other, breaths gasped and grasped with delight.

I miss your fingers in mine. Lengthening with the years, curling round my thickening joints, playing with the ring I bought for my fourth finger. Round and round you went, traces of your heat for a whole minute after.

When you finally drove yourself away, I caught your eye in the rear-view, but your lower face was cut off. Unreadable. The first piece of you that escaped my watch, departing with all I’d given you: a back seat of books and bedding and the skill of severance.

A whole silent year.

The waiter is lurking again. Judging me for your absence.

But before he can speak – here you are. The woman you are. So contained, so grown-up in your buttoned coat, your long black boots; gloves like gauntlets against the melting cold. You stride through the indignant queue, round the other diners, and across the tiled floor.

I stand, suddenly conscious of the table as an obstacle: of the carnation quivering in its vase, ready for a fall. I make a gesture of apology with my hands, annoyed with myself that I hadn’t thought ahead, through this – the mechanics of our encounter.

You smile, stand behind your chair. I think you’re smiling with me at my fluster, but you don’t say anything, do anything, don’t even start peeling off your gloves. We face the selves we have made.

You ease something from inside your still-buttoned coat and place it on the table.

You slide it past the pepper and salt, the vase, my knife, in a solid straight move. The headline and grainy photo are dulled to yellow and grey, but as you move the cutting into a square of sunlight all is re-bleached, edges sharpened, warnings sliced in serif.

I see and I realise and I sit.

I look up at you, leaning down with a triumph that is nearly grief.

Into the din of clattering cutlery and conversation, you murmur.

‘Your move, Mom.’

The restaurant parts to let you leave.

As you pass him, the waiter bends briefly at the waist: a dutiful little bow.

………………..

Jess Moody is a Wulfrunian in London. She likes her worlds and words a little weird. Short fiction in Lunate, Ellipsis, Storgy, Reflex, Retreat West, and Cabinet of Heed. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net, and shortlisted with Lunate, Retreat West and Storgy.

Twitter: @jesskamoody