The Risk Pool

it required such extraordinary vigilance on the part of the person awaiting the signal. Poor F. William Peterson couldn’t just drive by the house every half hour. He had to be out there in the street and watching until the signal was given. If he got distracted, or nodded off, he was likely to find the light in my mother’s bedroom gone off entirely, and that was another signal. Usually, what he’d do was back out of the driveway, go around the block, and park a few houses down. From my bedroom window I could usually spot his car by the red spot where his cigarette glowed in the front seat as he waited.
    Not that this was an every-night occurrence. She let him come to her this way no more than three nights a month, and afterwards he usually creaked back down the stairs around one in the morning to sleep in his own flat. Only rarely did he stay the night, and I always figured that was because they forgot and fell asleep. Then I’d wake to whispers in the kitchen and I’d have to wait until he tramped down the back stairs in the gray half-light of dawn before I could get up and use the bathroom.
    The weirdest part of all this was that things had to be played this way solely for my mother’s benefit. I knew what was going on. F. William Peterson knew that I knew. Without trying to, we would sometimes run into each other on the stairs or in the doorway to the bathroom at a time when he wasn’t supposed to be in the house, and then I’d have to duck back into my room before she saw that I saw and thereby avoid a long, utterly bizarre explanation about how the heat had gone out in Will’s flat and so he’d slept on our sofa (which sat pristine and unrumpled, devoid of blankets and pillow or other evidence of recent occupancy, in our collective peripheral vision). I always nodded soberly at these accounts, desiring only that she stop talking, stop piling up absurdities, so that I could stop pretending abject stupidity, for stupid I would have had to be to believe a word of her nonsense. I hadn’t any great objection to her not telling me the truth, but if I couldn’t have lied any better than that I’d have told the truth and faced the devil.
    I think it was the weight of living with her, the dreadful thinness of our lies to each other, that got me thinking about going to college, and one sufficiently distant that I would not be expected to come home for holidays. I did not dislike my mother, and I certainly did not dislike F. William Peterson. It was just too nuts, like being forced to play Liars day after day with an opponent who had transparent bills. As profoundly as it had rankled me to lose to my father all the time, this slightly different version of the game I acted out with my mother was far worse. It was like playing with a kid.
    So, in my junior year in high school, I started collecting college catalogues, and finally stumbled on just what I was looking for—an anthropology major with a specialty in archaeology. The best affordable schools were all in the western United States, a perfect excuse to go far, far away. My mother put up little fuss when I made applications. Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, California. The very places she’d spoken long distance to and dreamed of. She understood me. Perfectly.
    I slept until 6:30 when the telephone woke me. I counted seventeen rings before it stopped. It was dusk outside and the Sunday street was quiet. The Ford Galaxie I’d bought to come west with over six years ago sat at the curb. I’d have to sell it in the morning, unless I could get F. William Peterson to float me a loan when my mother called back, as she surely would. He’d send the money, no questions asked, which was why I knew I wouldn’t ask him.
    There was nothing in the refrigerator but an old jar of sweet pickles I couldn’t remember buying. I ate the three or four that remained, dumped the empty jar. In the morning, after I’d sold the car, I’d see about a part-time job, one that didn’t require a car, formally withdraw from the classes I’d stopped attending anyway, rethink, start over. That left just tonight. I thought about the loan Robert Crane had offered and regretted not taking him up on it. I should have agreed to meet him and Anita at the track. I could have told him I was sorry for getting steamed at him for explaining my losing streak and let them buy me dinner to show there were no hard feelings. The pickles had made me hungry.
    It was such a pleasant scenario I hated