The Risk Pool

copper pots and pans in a variety of sizes hung. Mrs. Ward had directed me to a stool directly beneath a still dripping one.
    “Quite a harrowing experience, actually,” she told Mrs. Petrie, without the slightest intention, apparently, of going into detail. Which was probably just as well, since the other woman gave no evidence of the slightest curiosity. “But we have excellent cause to congratulate ourselves that no one was … you know. Such terrible things sometimes happen to people.”
    Mrs. Ward appeared to be searching her memory for an illustration, but apparently Drew Littler, who might have qualified, it seemed to me, had already vanished from her consciousness. When, after a fleeting moment, she couldn’t think of anything terrible that ever happened to anyone, she gave up the project and remembered me. “Well now,” she said, “enjoy your … you know, and.…”
    And then she was gone, leaving me in the big kitchen with Mrs. Petrie, whose expression softened only slightly when the other woman disappeared. I got my parfait and a long-handled spoon to negotiate the tulip glass. Mrs. Petrie watched me eat the first mouthful, probably to see if I’d make a face, so I didn’t. Actually,it tasted pretty good, especially the green minty part. While I ate, she whacked away at the meat until it was thin, then divided it into squares and placed these in a puddle of what smelled like vinegar. After wrapping the bowl in cellophane the whole thing went into the refrigerator.
    “I hope she didn’t expect me to stay here till you finish that,” she said, though in truth I was only a spoonful from the bottom. “I was supposed to be home half an hour ago. I don’t suppose it would ever occur to her that I might have a family of my own to cook for or that they get hungry about the same time as other people.”
    From where I was sitting, I had a view of the drive and I saw the Lincoln emerge from the trees and pass between the stone pillars. Jack Ward was at the wheel, Tria, white-faced, beside him.
    Mrs. Petrie disappeared into a small room off the kitchen, then reappeared struggling into a lightweight raincoat. Her handbag she grabbed from atop the refrigerator. “I spect they’ll be in in a minute,” she said, “less they forget about you, which they might. There’s a half dozen more of those in the freezer and nobody around here ever counts a blessed thing. Eat them all if you want. Keep the glasses. Take home anything you like.”
    I studied her in vain for signs of levity. Did she possess some bizarre second sight that had allowed her to size me up as a thief right off? I hoped not, because I had no intention of stealing anything from the Wards. In fact, I’d given up thieving forever, right there in the Ward kitchen. Life had taken a miraculous turn. Just a few short days before I hadn’t been able to imagine ever seeing Tria Ward again, yet here I was eating out of a tulip glass
inside
the very house I’d studied from Myrtle Park and the rear end of Drew Littler’s motorcycle. And I was a savior no less. Tria Ward’s own personal savior. And she would be
my
savior, as well. She would reform me. Once we had professed our love for one another, I would confess how I had sneaked down into Klein’s Department Store back when I was shiftless. She would want to pay it all back, of course, out of her own money, but I’d nix that. I myself would sneak down into the store once a week, slipping ten or twenty into the register until I was an honest man again. By then I would be of marriageable age. I formulated this whole scenario as I sat there beneath the dripping pot.
    Outside I saw Jack Ward and his daughter emerge from the garage and from where I sat in the kitchen I got just a glimpseof Tria as she darted down the hall, where I heard a door open and close.
    When her father spied me, he looked puzzled, as if he’d forgotten about me entirely. I stood up. “Sam Hall’s boy, right?” he said.
    I admitted it.
    “Left you all alone, did they?” he looked around the kitchen.
    I shrugged, as if to suggest that this did not matter.
    “It happens around here,” he said.
    How strange I must have appeared to him, standing there at parade rest in the middle of his big kitchen, waiting for I knew not what. Something.
    “There’s a ball game on, probably,” Jack Ward said, though there was no television in sight. “We could watch that.”
    I followed him out through the dining room into a