The Risk Pool

Mercury, more rust than metal after the severe winter, was parked at the curb out front. Lately, my father had taken to falling asleep on the sofa in the afternoons after long nights at the poker table, snorting guiltily awake when I came in, professing surprise to have drifted off, even though it was pretty obvious that he had “drifted” off several hours earlier. Today, though, I had the place to myself. I shot a few racks of pool waiting for him to show up, pretty sure he would because the car was down there in the street.
    Shortly after five Rose stuck her head in and regarded me suspiciously. She left the salon the same time every day, her red hair a wine-colored cloud through the frozen glass of the door. Her stopping was unusual. She usually slid an envelope with my pay under the door sometime on Monday; otherwise, I rarely saw her.
    She looked the pool table over as if it confirmed her worst suspicions. “You okay?” she said.
    I said I was, trying to think if there was some reason I wasn’t supposed to be.
    “Can you lock this door?” she said, twisting the knob.
    “I guess,” I said. “If anybody wanted to.”
    She studied me, reluctant, for some reason, to leave. I didn’t think she was waiting for an invitation to shoot a rack of pool or I’d have asked her. “You ever see your mother?” she said finally.
    “Sometimes,” I said. In truth, it hadn’t been since Christmas. I hated for people to ask that question because it always felt like an accusation. “She’s in Schenectady.”
    “Where would you live if you didn’t live here?”
    “With him, I guess,” I told her. “With my father. Wherever.”
    “You could live with me,” she said. “I suppose. For a while.”
    It was clear that she had so little appetite for this prospect that I wondered why she’d bothered to give it voice. I told her thanks.
    She was no sooner gone than I heard Wussy’s lumbering approach on the stairs outside. “I suppose we should all be thankfulthis ain’t no ten-story building,” he said, kicking his boots off in the hall and leaving his down vest on the floor next to them. “How’s things here in the Accounting Department?”
    I said fine. My father had never bothered to scrape off the black letters stenciled on the door. It didn’t bother either of us, or even seem strange anymore.
    We shot a couple of racks of pool. Wussy was a pretty fair shooter, but I stayed right with him, winning more than I lost, a fact that did not appear to impress him particularly.
    “Let’s you and me go eat a hamburg steak, Sam’s Kid.”
    It was dinner time all right and I was pretty hungry, but I said maybe I’d better wait for my father.
    “We’ll just be across the street,” Wussy said. “Even Sam Hall could find us there without no trouble.”
    That was true, so I went along, still wondering where my father could be. The convertible hadn’t moved and he wasn’t in it asleep or anything because I checked. I half expected to see him at the counter in the Mohawk Grill, but he wasn’t. Harry had a pretty good crowd and a waitress on the floor, but he came over to take our order personally.
    “So?” he said.
    “So,” Wussy agreed.
    Skinny Donovan was there, two stools down, snoring peacefully, his head on the counter, cowlick astir.
    Wussy and I ordered hamburg steaks. People looked at us, went back to private conversations, their heads a little closer together. I began to feel spooked. I didn’t mind eating dinner with Wussy, it wasn’t that. Maybe it was just that the usually noisy diner was so quiet. We could hear. Skinny’s bottom lip flapping when he exhaled.
    “You might not see your old man till later in the week,” Wussy said when the food came, as if he hadn’t wanted to open a conversation until he had a pretext for abandoning it. “He said for you to go out and stay with Eileen for a few days if you want.”
    “Do I have to?” I said, not wanting to ask the obvious question, not with the convertible sitting at the curb right across the street. I didn’t have anything against staying with Eileen, but I didn’t really want to. There had been other nights when my father hadn’t come home, or came home so late that it didn’t count as coming home, and I didn’t mind staying alone in the apartment. I was going on fourteen, after all.
    Wussy shrugged as if he wasn’t sure whether or not I had to do something I didn’t want to. “You got money?”
    I said I did.
    “Take this