The Risk Pool

Social Security benefit. From my new cozy bedroom window, I had a nice view of our quiet, tree-lined street, one of the ones Drew Littler and I had cased on his motorcycle.
    I think F. William Peterson had pretty much made up his mind to marry my mother once the matter of her still being married to my father could be resolved. I don’t think she had done anything to give him the impression that she would marry him, but she hadn’t exactly told him she wouldn’t either. At thirty-eight, she’d gone almost completely gray, a metamorphosis that had taken only a few short months once the process had begun. In other respects, however, she looked more youthful than she had in years. The terrible frailty that had laid waste to her girlishness in the year before her nervous breakdown was reversed, and she had put on some weight. The thin breast that F. William Peterson had caught a glimpse of inside the pale green hospital gown was ample again, and he couldn’t have admired my mother more had he made her himself from his own design, which in a sense he had.
    In the beginning, he was our frequent, our only, visitor for dinner, though he never stayed the night.
    Incredible though it may seem, my other life simply ceased toexist. I didn’t see my father anymore, seldom saw any of his friends, never went into the Mohawk Grill. At my mother’s insistence I quit my job cleaning Rose’s and I had to give up my golf ball business, too; in return for these considerations I again got used to clean sheets, freshly pressed shirts, dinners eaten at a table in the house where I lived. I saw Wussy once and he told me that Drew Littler was in the state mental facility in Utica. After I’d gone back to live with my mother he’d gotten himself arrested three times for trespassing at the Ward house, and each time he was thrown in jail, where he entertained the drunks and the duty officer by beating his own forehead bloody against the bars of his cell until he passed out.
    One day, about a month after we moved into the new flat, the doorbell rang and it was two policemen who wanted to talk to me about the disappearance of Willie Heinz. My mother informed them that she knew the family in question, and she was certain that her son had no more than a passing acquaintance with such a boy. I followed the cops down to their car and told them about the afternoon I’d come out of Our Lady of Sorrows and seen Willie race by, a police car in hot pursuit. They wanted to fix the exact date and time, and it turned out I was able to because of Jack Ward’s death. Nobody they’d questioned, it turned out, remembered seeing him after me, which was pretty spooky. Did he ever talk about running away? they wanted to know. Did he ever discuss his home life? I told them no. I wanted to add that he seemed incapable of running more than a few blocks without doubling back, but I didn’t know how to explain without implicating myself in about a year’s worth of petty vandalism.
    All in all, we were not unhappy, my mother and I. Greenwood Drive was not a bad place to live and the flat became home soon enough. “So many lovely things,” my mother mused one day, with her now familiar vague smile. She was examining one of the items I’d stolen from Klein’s Department Store. “So many lovely things, and I cannot remember owning them.”
    But in the hospital and then the nursing home, she had stared at a great many mysteries and had learned to accept what was.
    What she and F. William Peterson feared was another war. It was Sam Hall they were dealing with, after all, and they both had good cause to remember what that could mean. The lawyer had purposelytaken a second-floor apartment for my mother and he’d installed new locks, front and back, at considerable expense, just in case things took an ugly turn. He also arranged for certain preparations at City Hall. Nobody asked me what I thought, but I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble. Even with my mother eating Libriums, it wouldn’t have taken more than a phone call or two of the sort my father was a past master at to send her back to the nursing home, deadbolt locks or no deadbolt locks.
    Anyway, the attack never came.
    One afternoon, a week before summer vacation was to start, I came home from school and Wussy’s pickup was parked out front with the tailgate down, looking pretty thoroughly out of place on our green street. He and my father were coming out of the garage when I pulled my bike into the