Free Trail of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz Page A

more than you’re saying.”
    “Maybe you should get a few extracurricular activities of your own. Then maybe you won’t be so preoccupied with your mother’s.”
    “I have extracurricular activities,” I smugly replied.
    “I’m sorry,” Dad said. “I forgot you play the Game of Kings. How’s that working out for you?”

KING, QUEEN, CASTLE, HORSE
    Three months earlier
    “What did you do?” Henry asked as he returned from the kitchen.
    “I took your castle with my horse.”
    Henry sat his cup of chamomile next to my whiskey beside the chess-board. “Please call the pieces by their appropriate names.”
    Sigh.
    “What is the horsey called?” he asked in a condescending tone.
    “Um . . . knight.”
    “And the castle?”
    “I’m drawing a blank.”
    “Rook.”
    “Oh yeah.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I took your rook with my knight.”
    Henry studied the chessboard.
    “First of all, if you’re going to take thirty minutes to decide on your next move, the least you can do is wait for me to return to the table before you steal my rook.”
    “Steal? Is that the proper language for the game?”
    “It is when you’re cheating.”
    “I didn’t cheat.”
    “This isn’t poker, Isabel. You need to show some good sportsman-ship.”
    “We’ve met before, right?”
    “I’m going to let the rook-stealing slide just this once.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Check,” Henry said, and the game was over.
    The three previous times we played chess together, Henry had made me study the endgame. To ensure that this would not happen again, I slid my arm across the board and knocked the pieces back into the box.
    “Once again, I’d like to remind you that the only reason we’re playing chess is because your dentist overbooked one day.”
    This is, in fact, truer than you can imagine. An emergency root canal was to blame for my current state of forced chess study and weekly losses. Henry was trapped in the waiting room of one Daniel Castillo, DDS’s office without any of his own reading material. Dr. Castillo (Ex #11) had left the magazine subscription duties to his full-time office manager, who has an unnatural fondness for trashy rags. The options were Hollywood tabloids or women’s magazines. Henry read, cover to cover, an issue of a magazine geared toward women in their thirties on a nose-diving mission for marriage, called Me. 2 (So, if you’re talking to your friend about the magazine, you’d say, “Hey, have you read the latest Me Squared ?”) One of the many articles he read (which included an astrological fashion assessment) 1 was a piece on relationship compatibility that strongly encouraged the sharing of each other’s activities. Turns out Henry and I, up to that point, had not shared any activities besides watching Doctor Who and debating the many issues on which we do not concur. I debated that the debating alone offered us plenty of shared experience, but Henry stood his ground and demanded that we each choose an activity that we could do together.
    I didn’t choose, thinking this phase would blow over. But when Henry bought me a book called Chess for Imbeciles, I realized how serious this had become. My only response was retaliation. I chose beer tasting as my hobby. This, as far as I was concerned, meant going to a dive bar and drinking beer.
    Henry, however, had a more lofty approach and would often arrange tours at local microbreweries. If you ask me, listening to someone lecture you about why beer tastes the way it does kind of takes the fun out of drinking it. Plus, when they say “tasting” they’re dead serious about that. You’re lucky if you can get a pint in you after a three-hour tour.
    But I digress. Much to my dismay, when I returned home that night, I found Gertrude and Henry in the midst of what appeared to be an intense and evenly matched game of chess.
    “What’s going on here?” I asked, feeling a bit betrayed by Gerty.
    “Just a friendly game,” Henry said.
    “Why do