I can’t remember my mother ever playing games in her life. She would watch us from afar, drinking and smoking, a look of loathing in her eyes. Much like the look she has now, recalling my father’s tactics.
“He got to my family, is what he did. Before I could run out and get you scraped clean out of me, I was getting phone calls of congratulations from my mamma and daddy and my cousins and brothers and aunts and uncles from every trailer park and pig wallow in Alabama. He used his inheritance and bought them all houses and jewelry and paid their debts and sent them gambling money. He asked my father for my hand in marriage, contingent on us having this baby and many more babies. And in return, he was going to keep my family set up forever with his Nylo family fortune: a fortune that he wanted to use to make fucking board games and novelties. I was trapped.”
She shakes her head in defeat, and reaches into her pocket to pull out a pack of cigarettes.
“He made it so that my family would hate me for the rest of my life if I spurned him. He solved all of their problems, joining us with capital in a way that would never work with mere feelings. I guess he really must have loved me back then, before he knew completely what I was like. Maybe he never knew completely. To drag my whole genome out of the filth and into the glory of Yankee wealth, all I would need to do was have his babies. He attacked me where I was weak: my pride. And so I let you be born. I regretted it instantly. But I did it. I did it knowing that I could always take it back if I really wanted. I wanted my family to be strong. To be rich. To prosper and to thank me for it. Pride. Pride is all it was.”
She slips a cigarette from the pack and lights it. I reach into my jacket and pull out a pack of my own. I realize that we both smoke Dunhills. Of course we do. My first pack was probably one of hers that I found after she died.
After she didn’t die.
“The years slipped by,” she continues, after taking a deep drag and sending a puff of smoke wafting across the room. “Your brothers came next. I realized that having children isn’t so bad when you’re obscenely wealthy. You didn’t seem to need my love. Those early years were actually kind of a blur. Your father struggled with his game designs, trying like hell to have some kind of independent success so he could wrest himself from his family’s purse strings. He was rich as hell for Alabama, but for a Yankee scion he was woefully dependent. Which meant that I was also crippled by his failures, forced to travel with him to beg his mother and father for infusions of cash, or to accompany him to banks to look pretty while he wheedled out loans. He needed a success and so I gave him one.”
Her eyes flick to the ground, where all the pieces of Sea Farmers are scattered on the ground.
“I had never invented a game before or studied game theory or anything like that,” she says. “I just based Sea Farmers on how people live back home: pretending to be all social and caring and Christian while trying to destroy each other and buy each other’s land out from under bank debts and render curses unto the seventh generation and all that. Basic human evil and primordial shittiness, the kind that’s always right there in front of you if you ever choose to look. My original had the Kraken from the very beginning, but your father didn’t like how brutal the game could become that way. He changed the rules, and Sea Farmers was an instant hit.”
She smiles ruefully and brings the Dunhill to her lips for another pull. “Of course, your father said that no one would ever buy it if they knew that the game was invented by a woman. As if they really would have cared. I was allowed to come into the office, but the game’s origins had to stay a secret for his own pride and vanity, for the good of the company, he said. There wasn’t much for me to do in those early days, since I had no interest in developing follow-ups or marketing the damn game to all the rubes of America and Europe. Your father was very sensitive to the smell of paint, so I repainted the walls of the office over and over again to torture him. He had a constant headache back in those days. It kept him
