The Risk Pool

woman, who continued to eat the cracker as if she doubted it would be her lot in life ever again to eat anything so delicious.
    After a while I slipped away. As usual, my father knew everybody. Eventually he would notice I was gone, but we had an understanding about that. I could be gone all I wanted, provided I was back by the time he was ready to go someplace else. And gauging when that might be ready wasn’t as tough as you might think. He had a rhythm to him. In bars I could tell, within a minute or two, when he’d get up to go to the men’s room, when he’d figure it was time to beat me in a game of shufflebowl. Now, I could tell just by looking at him that he’d be pretty content for a while.
    Somebody had opened the door to the library, where Jack Ward had left me on my previous visit, and people had spilled in there to escape the crush. Only now that room was crowded too, if not quite as noisy as the big foyer. A large man knelt in front of the big console television, as if he were contemplating turning the set on so he could compare its picture with his own. Nearby, a frizzy-hairedwoman removed a leatherbound volume from one of the tall oak bookcases, glanced around the room, and slipped it into her big bag. Then she noticed me, and when I didn’t look away, she checked again to make sure nobody was watching, and replaced the book. When the man kneeling in front of the TV straightened up, he and the frizzy-haired woman left the room together, though not before she located me again and narrowed her eyes at me murderously. Out of curiosity I went over to the bookcase to find out what she’d wanted so badly, because I’d never seen anybody steal a book before. This one was a fancy movie edition of
Gone with the Wind
, which explained it.
    I wandered. There were other people I knew in the crowd. Rose, her orange hair in a shockingly tall beehive, looked right at me and away again. She’d never seen me all spit-shined before, so I couldn’t blame her for not recognizing me. Just inside the living room doorway, the old Monsignor sat in a high-backed throne-shaped chair, Mrs. Ambrosino, soberly resplendent in a billowy dress, in attendance at his side, rather pointedly refusing hors d’oeuvres on his behalf, well in advance of the old man’s actually seeing a single offering. I steered clear.
    Then F. William Peterson materialized at my elbow and drew me aside like a conspirator, looking excited and flushed. “You’ll be home in the morning?” he wanted to know. I said probably, and that seemed to please him. He had just a thin tuft of baby-fine hair on top now, and it stood on end. “Great things,” he whispered. “You wait.”
    After a while I joined the line filing slowly toward and past Jack Ward’s casket. He was dressed the way I remembered him, in a white suit with a pale pink sweater, slender and graceful even in death. I refused to think of him as a comic figure on the terrace of the Mohawk Country Club, his trousers down around his knees. I promised myself I would never laugh at the story when it was recounted at the diner, for it surely would be, for a long time to come. Maybe, I thought, even if I never amounted to anything, it would be enough not to be the sort of man who’d tell the story of Jack Ward’s final round for laughs.
    There was no way to tell by looking at Hilda Ward whether she’d been spared the details of her husband’s death. Even smaller than I remembered, the tiny woman gave no hint of grief or loss, and I thought of what Mrs. Petrie had said in the kitchen about her being rid of him. I also remembered the way she’d treated him the afternoon Tria had backed his Lincoln into thewoods. Tria stood next to her mother now, her dark eyes full, and she was so lovely I felt a dull ache in my chest. Her face was the color of her father’s fine suit, and she could not take her eyes off him, even to receive condolences. Suddenly, I knew I could not face her, could not present myself to her. I left the line and the living room.
    My father was still talking to some people in the foyer, so I went back into the library, which had emptied out. For some reason, the first thing I saw was the small gap on one of the shelves across the room. I ran my fingers along the spines of the books, stopping at the space where the fancy
Gone with the Wind
had been. The horrible woman had come back for it.
    We dropped Eileen off and drove home.
    “What’d our friend want?” my father