The Risk Pool

could see was that the place was now surrounded by flowers—bright tulips and mums, along with some other exotic blooms I didn’t recognize. I’d no sooner pulled up and turned off the ignition when the explanation came slinking into view from around the corner of the house in a pair of gray work pants with dirty knees.
    “Hello, Skinny,” I said, stopping him in his tracks. Somebody had told me that the old Monsignor had finally died, like he’d been promising to do for so many years, and that the new pastor had had no more use for flowers than alcoholic gardeners. I’m sure I never expected him to turn up here though.
    It was pretty clear he hadn’t been expecting me either, because he glowered at me suspiciously, as if he’d already divined the truth of the matter—that for the second time in a life that was far too short, I had been invited
into
a house that was strictly off limits to himself. To make matters worse, he suspected that I was to be fed.
    “Nice car,” he said, eyeing the New Yorker and looking as if he wasn’t sure he was permitted to touch its exterior. When I got out, he looked inside. Then he stood erect and looked around. “Where’s Sammy?”
    “In the trunk,” I said.
    He looked at the trunk. It was big enough to contain my father. “Bullshit,” he said finally.
    “You got me,” I admitted. “Nice tulips.”
    He looked at them suspiciously, as if he suspected sarcasm. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette?”
    I didn’t, but F. William Peterson had left a pack on the front seat, so I offered him one of those.
    “Salems,” he said, and spit. He took one though, and lit up, his yellow hands shaking badly. His face was jaundiced too, now that I looked.
    “Take a puff,” I said. “It’s springtime.”
    “It’s already fuckin’ springtime,” he said. “Where
you
been?”
    I shrugged, as if to suggest I didn’t know quite where. I didn’t know how to summarize ten years, at least not for Skinny Donovan. Besides, I wasn’t quite sure he’d noticed that I’d been away. “I’m tending bar at Mike’s Place right now.”
    “How come your father don’t get you on the road with him? Damn good pay, is what I hear.”
    “You have to be in the union,” I told him. “Besides, it’s ball-breaking work.”
    “
I
could do it,” he said angrily. “I work three jobs right now.”
    “Really,” I said.
    “Bet your ass. All three don’t pay what Sammy makes.”
    I said I was sorry to hear it.
    “And I could use the money,” he repeated, as if this were the principal consideration. He’d never needed the money before and now he did, so it followed that something would just have to be worked out.
    “I know what you mean,” I said. “This isn’t my car by the way.”
    He looked relieved to learn it.
    “I might say something to your old man,” he said, eyeing me still.
    “Couldn’t hurt,” I said.
    “Sammy’s the best,” he said. “He’d do it for me if I asked him. He’d give me his
own
job if I asked him. We’re like this.” He held up crossed fingers.
    The front door opened then and Tria appeared. I waved.
    Skinny looked in the general direction of the girl, but appeared not to see her. “I might not even ask him,” he said. “But he’d do it.”
    The Salem was down to its filter, but Skinny sucked away at it, as if it were not smoke entering his yellow lungs, but myriad possibilities. “I might ask him,” he said. “I might.”
    We ate outdoors on a small patio off the back of the house. It had a southeastern exposure, and the early May sun had some real summer warmth to it for the first time. The gentle wooded foothills of the Adirondacks fell away to the south all the way to the Mohawk River, which was invisible but hinted at by the weaving black ribbon of distant trees. Or maybe it wasn’t the river at all, but something else that threaded its way, shadowlike, across the gentle landscape.
    “Mother will join us shortly,” Tria Ward said when we were seated at the white canopied table, which sported a pitcher of orange juice and a sweating bottle of chilled champagne. Tria looked almost too lovely in a fresh, summery dress tied at palebare shoulders by spaghetti-thin straps. It made me wonder why she’d want to look so splendid to entertain a virtual stranger, one invited by her mother, no less. I decided her closet was full of equally enchanting dresses, and that she was wearing, in all probability, her least favorite. I was grateful