The Risk Pool

about the time the salesmen started arriving and left as soon as he’d signed what needed signing, just about the time his wife Irma arrived to cook for the lunch crowd. They passed each other silently, Mike giving her plenty of room. Rumor had it that they’d not spoken meaningfully since he’d lost the other restaurant, even though this more modest establishment, according to my father, did just about as well without half the aggravation. Be that as it may, Irma looked even meaner than I remembered her from The Elms. You could hear her muttering furiously and slinging pans in the tiny kitchen, and as the steam rose up from the big cauldrons she used to cook spaghetti, the sweat poured down her broad expanse of forehead from the roots of her now white hair, disappearing eventually into the stiff uniform she always wore to remind Mike how cruelly she was reduced since losing The Elms.
    I gave Irma plenty of room until I discovered that she liked me. I could tell this from the occasional gestures of intimacy she offered me and no one else. Two or three times a day she emerged from her steam-bath kitchen for a soda, which I’d draw her in a larger tumbler full of ice. This she would accept, drain on the spot, and wait for me to refill it. This second glass she would take back into the kitchen with her, but not before looking around the place, nodding, nudging me with one of her big elbows, and saying, “Assholes!”
    Though she took little enough pleasure in it, Irma made the best spaghetti sauce in town, and between twelve and one-thirty we jammed the place with the downtown lunch crowd that could afford a buck a plate more than Harry got for a hamburger and thick gravy-drenched fries. And, while nobody thought of tippingat the Mohawk Grill, it was generally understood that you had to save at least a quarter for the girls who waited on the booths at Mike’s Place, one of whom turned out to be Eileen Littler. She worked three lunches a week for Mike, four or five evenings at a restaurant in the valley.
    “A little bird told me you were back,” she said accusatorily, the first shift we worked together.
    “A little bird?” I said, surprised, curious.
    “A little blackbird,” she said, “who was up at the hospital this morning looking for a shot of penicillin. I hear it’s nice up at the lakes this time of year.”
    Most days the waitresses could go home by two, at which time the regular drinkers would start wandering in. Three-thirty to four-thirty was Untemeyer territory. Mike’s was the bookie’s next-to-last stop of the afternoon, after Harry’s and before Greenie’s, where he did most of his business when the shops let out. Necessity made me something of a bookie myself, taking the action of the lunch crowd who had to get back to work. I was also expected to be knowledgeable, serving up a tip with a boiler-maker, in return for which I got good-natured insults when the nags didn’t run.
    On Wednesday afternoon of my first week, my father wandered in ten minutes after Eileen left, looked around the place at my customers and said thank God he was going back to work soon.
    “Thank God is r-r-right,” said Tree, who had been in several times that week and not recognized in me anybody he’d ever seen before. I’d wanted to ask him about Alice, the big woman he’d smooched with at The Lookout so long ago, and about the even bigger woman who’d eaten the pâté at Jack Ward’s wake, but I didn’t. My father informed me later that Tree had divorced the pâté woman and married Alice shortly after I’d gone west. They were living up above the bar, and Tree only came into town once or twice a week, at which times he dropped in on his ex-wife, with whom he now had a little something going on the side. My father couldn’t make up his mind which woman was bigger and razzed Tree about it pretty unmercifully, demanding to know.
    “It varies,” Tree always responded. “W-w-week to week.”
    “Stay on top if you can,” my father urged.
    “I’m the m-m-man, ain’t I?”
    “You sure are, Tree,” my father said, clapping his hand on the little man’s back. “You sure are.”
    I drew my father a beer and set it in front of him. He was usuallyall right when he drank beer, so I got him started that way before he had a chance to think about it. According to Mike, it was the hard liquor that was doing him in, but he’d been pretty sober since my return, and I figured if he could stay that way until he