The Risk Pool

for her beauty anyway, and when she leaned over to pour champagne and orange juice into my goblet I was more grateful still.
    “Do the mimosas, dear,” Mrs. Ward’s voice sang from the open kitchen window. “I do hope Mr.… likes mimosas.”
    Mr.… had never had a mimosa before, but he discovered he liked them quite a lot. The first few sips did what the handful of aspirin he’d swallowed before leaving his mother’s had failed to do.
    “I’m so sorry I didn’t remember you yesterday,” Tria Ward said. “I did by the time we got home.”
    “I was pretty crushed,” I admitted. “After all, you did promise to marry me.”
    Her eyes got very large, and I could tell she was struggling with the possibility that this absurdity might be true. “What?” she said, clearly ready to apologize for having forgotten this too.
    I smiled to let her off the hook.
    “You’re joking,” she said.
    “Actually, yes,” I said. “I think we’ve only met on three occasions. Name all three and win a prize.”
    “One is easy. The afternoon I backed my father’s car into the woods and we all had to walk up here. I wanted to die.”
    “Okay, that’s one.”
    “And at a restaurant, somewhere. You were with your father and he told a dirty joke.”
    “And
I
wanted to die,” I said.
    “I can’t remember the third time,” she finally admitted, her faint resemblance to her mother growing more pronounced when she frowned.
    Since the third was her father’s funeral, and since it didn’t count because we’d not actually spoken, I said I didn’t remember either.
    “Then how do you know there were three?”
    “I don’t,” I said. “Maybe it was just two.”
    “Then there’s no way I can win the prize. You don’t play fair.”
    “I’m a scoundrel,” I conceded, mildly surprised that the “prize” concept had interested her.
    “Who’s a scoundrel?” said Mrs. Ward, who had materialized at my shoulder carrying three more goblets, these full of fresh fruits, half of them new to me, all diced into bite-sized chunks. “Nobody is capable of being a scoundrel on such a glorious day as this,” Mrs. Ward said. “Simply glorious.”
    I agreed. It was glorious.
    “The first day of the rest of our lives,” Mrs. Ward continued, seating herself in the third chair. “I heard that somewhere and it stuck in my mind. That’s the way to look at this old life.”
    “It certainly is,” I said.
    “See?” Mrs. Ward said to her daughter. “You’re the only gloomy-gus at the table.”
    “I’m not gloomy, Mother,” Tria said. “I’m simply a realist.”
    “A
gloomy
realist. Thank heavens Mr.… is not a gloomy realist, or we wouldn’t be able to enjoy our brunch.”
    We ate reverentially until Tria, as if to dispel the notion that she was gloomy, said that the kiwi was wonderful.
    “It certainly is,” I said, making a mental note not to use this phrase again for at least half an hour, and wondering which of the fruits I was eating might be the kiwi.
    There was a long moment then when we suddenly all seemed to realize that we might not be able to recapture the rhythm of normal conversation. We were on stage and somebody had missed a cue and now nobody knew whose turn it was to speak. Maybe the whole thing had been a bad idea, we all seemed to be thinking, as we dipped with renewed interest into our goblets, as if it were in the nature of kiwi and passion fruit to save us.
    “A glorious day to be alive,” Mrs. Ward finally offered.
    “It certainly is,” I said.
    There was much more to eat, Mrs. Ward assured us. No, she didn’t need any help to fetch it. Tria and I watched her patter into the house, and I wondered what had become of their ill-tempered cook.
    “How are you at saying no,” Tria said in a lowered voice, once we had the patio to ourselves.
    I said it depended on who I was saying no to, almost adding that I didn’t think I’d have much luck saying no to her.
    “Well, be prepared,” Tria said. “Because she’s working up to something.”
    “What?” I said, genuinely curious as to what I possessed that Mrs. Ward could possibly want.
    “I think I know, but I’m hoping I’m wrong,” she said. Then she reached across the table and touched my hand lightly, and only for a second. “Please don’t laugh at her though.”
    Actually, thanks to the mimosas, I was feeling extraordinarily tolerant. Exactly one month earlier I’d hit bottom in Tucson, making a complete mess of my graduate