Read Online The Snow Angel by Glenn Beck, Nicole Baart - Free Book Online Page B

feel his brow furrow in confusion, but before he can formulate a polite question the man smiles.
    “Cooper,” he says. “We were going to play a game.”
    “I don’t know how to play chess.” Mitch gives the perplexing bag of stone pieces a furtive glance. For some reason he knows that the carved tokens are pawns and knights, rooks and royalty. But he can’t imagine what they are supposed to do.
    “Good thing I brought the checkers, too.” Cooper spins his hand and reveals a second cloth bag. This one is filled with red and black disks.
    “I don’t think I know how to play checkers either.”
    “It’s easy. I can teach you in less than five minutes. You’ll probably mop the floor up with me.”
    Mitch lets himself be led to a small table near a span of floor-to-ceiling windows. The day is soft and gray, muted with the silence of a storybook snowfall. It is a lovely sight, but one look at the gentle storm and Mitch knows that the roads will be a nightmare in no time at all. The plows simply won’t be able to keep up with the volume.
    “I drove a plow,” Mitch says, staring out the window.
    “You had a plow attached to the front of your work truck,” Cooper amends. He lays out the checkered board between them and begins to methodically place the red playing pieces on the black squares in front of him. “You could bolt the plow blade on in the winter, and take it off in the summer. It was a side job.”
    “A side job?”
    “A way to make some extra cash. Construction slows down a lot in the winter, you know.”
    Construction. Mitch looks at his hands and is warmed by the certainty that he was good at what he did. The corner of his mouth tweaks as his body remembers what it was like to jump from one roof truss to the next. He had amazing balance. He could walk from one side of an unfinished building to the other, skimming the narrow boards with his feet and never once catching anything forsupport. A part of him would like to tell Cooper this, but the stranger beats him to the punch.
    “You should have been an architect,” he says. “You had an eye for it. It takes someone special to build a home, and you built the best.”
    The rush of pride that Mitch feels is short-lived as understanding spills over him. “A home is more than a building,” he says. It seems like a profound thought. Something he should have realized sooner.
    Cooper looks up and meets his gaze. “You’re right. A home is much more than a building.” He seems to want Mitch to say something, but for the life of him Mitch can’t figure out what it might be.
    Instead of responding, Mitch reaches for the checkers and begins to copy the pattern that Cooper made. Black tiles on black spaces.
    When they start to play, the rules come back to Mitch like riding a bike. He jumps three of Cooper’s checkers and soon has control over the board. The game doesn’t require much thought, but when Mitch reaches for the bag of chess pieces and fingers the individual tiles, he’s disappointed to find that they are still meaningless bits of stone to him. He simply doesn’t feel up to trying.
    “You seem sad today,” Cooper comments when Mitch deposits the bag back on the table between them.
    It’s a rather forward thing to say, but Cooper seems to think that they’re on pretty familiar terms. Mitch decides not to be cranky because he doesn’t want to offend the only person in the entire atrium who has paid him an ounce of attention. “I have a hard time remembering some things,” he admits.
    “Don’t we all.” Cooper slides a checker into an unprotected corner of the board. “King me.”
    Mitch obliges, crowning Cooper’s red disk with an extra from the pile he’s amassed. “This feels different,” Mitch says. “It’s a different kind of forgetful.”
    “It’s Alzheimer’s.” Cooper’s proclamation is matter-of-fact.
    “Is it bad?”
    “Bad enough.”
    Mitch considers this for a moment. “My memory feels like Swiss cheese.