The days leading up to Thanksgiving became an elaborate game of domestic chess. Ray’s king, who only wanted to castle short and mind his own business in a corner, was assailed by opposing forces from both flanks. His father, a short, thin, gray-haired man whose face had developed a kind of puffiness with old age and whose eyes had narrowed to small horizontal slits, haunted both floors of the house like a slow-moving, legally blind ghost. He had a way of walking into whatever room Ray was in, hands joined against his lower back, like a Parisian flaneur (his words), that always managed to drive Ray up the cherrywood-paneled wall: he had no reason to come in and made no attempt to hide the fact, he just walked in and sort of loitered. It would have been quite better, honestly, if his father had started chopping wood right there in the room—something Ray pointed out with the disgruntled “What?” that opened most of their conversations throughout the two weeks.