imperfect engine, and it does what it will with the information it receives. He failed to see how lonely she was; she felt he didn’t need her; events followed their natural course. It wasn’t his fault. It could never have been his fault. But he didn’t see it coming, and he should have. Somehow, he should have.
When Dodger returns she finds him outside the sliding glass door, crouching on the concrete step that serves as their “porch,” scratching old Bill behind the ears. The ragged battle-axe of a tomcat is purring so loud she can hear it from three feet away, almost tumbling over himself in his effort to get closer to Roger’s practiced fingers.
“You have a cat?” she asks, putting the chess set she carries down on the table.
“Not right now,” he says. “Student housing wasn’t so good for pet ownership, and I just moved off-campus. My most recent ex-girlfriend had one, though. She got a note from her psychiatrist calling it a necessary therapy animal, and we mostly spent time in her room.”
“Oh,” says Dodger. “What was her name?”
“Zucchini.”
Dodger blinks.
Roger looks over his shoulder, sees her expression, and bursts out laughing. “Oh, man, your face—not the girlfriend, Dodge, the cat. The cat was named Zucchini. The fact that I gave you the cat’s name first explains why we broke up. We were both exhausted all the time, and I’d go to her place to pet the cat and try to ease my nerves. Eventually, Kelly decided she wanted to find a boyfriend who’d pet the Kelly instead of the kitty, and we parted ways. Amiably.”
He’s good at that: parting amiably. Every relationship he’s ever been in has ended amiably. Even his relationship with Alison, which had had the most potential to go horribly wrong, ended with the two of them being perfectly civil to each other when they passed in the halls or met in class. Parting amiably is one of his great skills.
Except with Dodger. Every time they’ve parted has been incredibly traumatic, for both of them. He gives the cat one last scratch and stands, stepping back into the apartment and closing the glass door before old Bill can follow. The big tom tries anyway, stepping right up to the glass and meowing. His eyes are locked on Roger.
“You’re doomed,” says Dodger, laying out the chess set. Her movements are quick, practiced, precise; she barely looks at the pieces before putting them on the board. If it were possible for someone to feel the difference in color between two otherwise identical pawns, she’d be doing it. “That cat knows a sucker when he sees one, and now you’re doomed. It’s been nice knowing you.”
“Now, you and I both know that hasn’t always been true,” he says.
Dodger pauses for an instant before she resumes setting out the pieces, hands moving too fast to be acting on anything but autopilot. “Maybe not, but it’s polite to pretend,” she says. She sets out the last piece, puts the shoe box she was taking them out of aside, and sits, taking the chair furthest from where he’s standing. This puts her on the black side of the board. Normally, they’d agree to the sides they were playing, he knows that. He isn’t going to object. If she’s choosing her color based on whether it keeps her away from him, he’s not going to pursue.
He sits. Then he frowns, squinting at the set, and leans forward to pick up a bishop, rolling it over in his hand. “Isn’t this the set you used to keep down in the gully?” he asks. “I remember when you thought you’d lost your bishop. You were inconsolable for days. And then it rained, and washed the mud away so you could find the missing piece, and you started keeping everything in your room, because an incomplete chess set wasn’t any good.”
“You kept saying that even if the piece was lost forever, I could find a new one. You said you’d look in every Goodwill in Massachusetts if you had to.”
“I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to,” he says. “I hate seeing you cry, but I had no idea how I was going to explain to my parents that I needed to buy just one chess piece and mail it to a girl in California.”
“At least then you would have let me give you my address.”
“I don’t think I could have found a way to avoid it.”