Keeping Score

WE’RE NOT SURE if we’re going to make it—through the card game or through this stage of our relationship. I sit at the dining table with my gaming partner, my husband of eight years, Kylie. We are not a fighting couple, but lately, we’ve been having too many tense conversations, too many miscommunications, too many misses altogether. So, we do what we always do when we feel distant: we play a board game. Tonight, we have chosen Hanabi, a game that is horrible on marriage while you play but creates better communication overall—hopefully.

Hanabi—which means “fireworks” in Japanese—is a cooperative game, meaning that Kylie and I work together. The trick is we can’t see our own hands; we each hold our cards facing ouward. The goal is to play twenty-five of the cards in sequential order. A perfect 25 game will end with five different colored piles of five cards in numerical order: a collaborative fireworks display. But if we miss, if the numbers below the card one of us selects have not been played, we are forced to discard it.

We shuffle and deal.

WE ARE SITTING at a table that is also the scene for the other big game we play: the game of life. And no, I don’t mean the classic game with the green board and orange road—although if we played it, we would have filled our car with the traditional blue and pink pegs in the front seats, and we’d add two pink pegs in the back. It’s the other game of life we play, the real world life, with taxes and a mortgage and salaries and all of the work that goes into caring for the two little girls sleeping upstairs.

Our pink pegs are four and almost two years old; rather than send them to daycare, we have arranged our lives around being their primary caregivers. I teach classes in the