The Risk Pool

vague promise of brunch the following morning. At the landing, she gave me her keys, all two of them, so that I could open the door. I was hoping she’d opt for bed right away, but instead she slipped into one of the dinette chairs in the kitchen and began to cry, her head on the table. When she finally looked up at me, her eyes were red and swollen. “Look at me,” she sniffled, “crying all over you your first night back.”
    Actually, she wasn’t crying anywhere near me. I had pulled up the chair opposite her and waited.
    “He’s such a good man,” my mother said. “How I
wish
I loved him.”
    “He’s certainly crazy about you,” I said, trying to make carefully chosen words sound casual.
    “I know,” she admitted. “It’s horrible.”
    “It’s horrible that someone loves you?”
    “Yes,” she said, looking off somewhere. “I want … my own true love.”
    Her own true love. The outrageous simplicity, modesty, and arrogance of it took my breath away. It seemed to me, then and now, a wish that everyone had a right to, but that only the very foolish or the terminally naïve trouble themselves over.
    “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not like this most of the time. Thank God for your grandfather.”
    The remark took me off guard, though I should have seen what was coming.
    “You don’t remember?” she said, her smile crooked, her eyes narrowing, as if at something nasty.
    “No,” I said, but I had an idea.
    “Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter,” she grinned.
    “You forgot Fourth of July,” I said.
    “No,” she said. “It’s just gone. Long, long gone.”
    She got up then and went into her room, allowing the door to swing shut behind her. My guess was she’d be asleep in five minutes. I knew I wouldn’t.

33
    Mike’s Place did a surprising daytime business. When I opened up at 7:30 in the morning, there were always several men waiting outside with the shakes and if I knew what was good for me I opened at 7:30 and not 7:31. They streamed in through the open doorway like ghosts in the early morning light, compromising my attempts to give the place a good airing out. Most of them were on their way to the shops and would be gone by eight, and only then would the stale beer and cigarette smoke and the smell of urinal cakes from the small rest rooms begin to dissipate in the crosscurrents. The fresher air brought talkative liquor salesmen and truck drivers making deliveries, bullshitters one and all, who drank coffee with a little pick-me-up in it and wanted to know about my love life. I could have told them about Marion, but I didn’t. I used the slack midmorning to swab down the bar and the dark, high-backed booths that lined one long wall from the front door to the end of the bar. At least once a week I took down all the bottles off the back bar and dusted, replacing the two dozen or so brands of whiskey that were seldom called, along with expensive vodkas, gins and liqueurs on top of the rings they’d left on the dark wood surface.
    It took me a while to understand why I was not embraced enthusiastically by the salesmen and delivery men and the regular day crowd at Mike’s Place. I knew they’d been used to Satch, my predecessor, who had been unceremoniously canned to make room for me. Eventually, however, I discovered that the reason Satch was so much loved and missed was that he was the sort of fellow who hated to take money from guys he knew. The trouble was that Mike’s was the sort of place where after a week or two you knew everybody. Satch not only let the salesmen drink coffee for free, but he laced that coffee freely, and generally dispensed spirits as if he were heading up a nonprofit organization. Accordingto my father, whole hours would drift by with the place half full, its peaceful atmosphere never interrupted by the raucous ringing of the old cash register. And when it did ring, chances were it said “No Sale.” Satch and my father had pretty nearly got into it one afternoon when my father suggested the bartender use the drawer for something besides making change. Just what the hell was that supposed to mean, Satch wanted to know. He did pretty goddamn well by Mike. He treated Mike’s business like it was his own. Right, my father said. You put the money in your pocket. There must have been some truth to my father’s allegations because my first week behind the bar saw half as many customers and about twice as much profit.
    Mike usually came in