The Risk Pool

hand. “Let’s go out on the patio and watch the storm,” I suggested.
    “Why?”
    “No reason,” I admitted.
    “Mother has candles somewhere.”
    “To hell with them,” I said.
    The rest of the house was not so dark. Each of the long picture windows of the living room let in enough gray light for us to locate the sliding glass door that led out onto the patio. Heat lightning glowed yellow and orange in the night sky, each charge powerful enough to illuminate one quadrant of low clouds.
    “It’s just us,” Tria said, pointing to the other side of the highway below where there were still lights from streetlamps and houses.
    “What was it like to grow up here?” I said. I was still holding her cool hand, grateful that she had made no effort to withdraw it.
    “What do you mean?”
    I could feel her studying me and felt the strangeness of my own question. “I don’t know exactly what I mean,” I admitted. “Being up here, above it all, I guess. Having money, in a place like Mohawk.”
    When she said nothing, I decided to take a chance, and pointed to a dark place in what was the uppermost reaches of Myrtle Park. “I used to wonder about this house when I was a kid. You can see it from up there in the park. I thought of it as the white jewel house because of the way the sun reflected off it. I wondered what sort of people lived here, what they might be like. I must have been about ten.”
    “It wasn’t anything like you imagined,” she said slowly, as if choosing her words with care. “Like you imagine.”
    She pressured my hand lightly. It might have been a signal to let go, or an invitation. I decided it meant the latter and drew her to me. She neither returned my kiss nor drew away.
    “And you’ve wanted to do that since you were ten?”
    “I didn’t know you then.”
    “But you were already in love with the house.”
    The possibility that this might be true stopped me dead, and the hot wind rattled the patio furniture urgently. For the first time I smelled rain. “Maybe we should go back in,” I admitted. “We may be in for it.”
    “No,” she said with surprising conviction. “It’s not going to rain. The wind is going to howl and howl and nothing is going to come of it.”
    There seemed to me another invitation somewhere in this, and I was right, because this time she kissed me back, allowed herself to melt toward me, and we stayed there under the heat lightninguntil the low, fast-moving clouds that came at us from behind the park were blown over our heads toward the southeast and the invisible black band of trees that marked the river.
    I dozed, for an hour perhaps, and awakened to soft drumming on the roof. Or maybe it was Tria stirring that had awakened me. I could tell that she was awake now and that she may have been since we made love. She lay with her back to me facing the window, its blinds three quarters drawn. When I drew her toward me at the waist, she turned and burrowed into me as if she couldn’t get close or warm enough. It took me a minute to realize that she was crying. I let her, not saying anything for quite a while, just stroking her hair.
    When she finally stopped, I said, “I guess this wasn’t such a hot idea.”
    “It’s … not … you,” she whispered. “Please believe that. It’s just …”
    “I know,” I told her, though I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was. I was just glad it wasn’t me.
    “It’s strange to be a woman in the same room where you were a child,” she said, after she’d had a chance to think. “My father used to come in here and tuck me in and say that someday there’d be boys in my life, and I’d say no, never—”
    “I liked your father,” I told her.
    She wiped her eyes and raised up on one elbow, charmingly, breathtakingly immodest. “Really? Why?”
    I had to think about it. “He was different,” I said finally. “I didn’t know anyone like him. I was pretty impressed.”
    “And your own father?”
    “He’s different too,” I said.
    “You love him?”
    “Sure,” I said. “I mean yes, very much. I’m trying to decide if he has any feelings for me, though.”
    “I bet he does.”
    “Maybe,” I admitted. “He gets along so well without me that I can never be sure. I don’t think he’s ever had a bad night worrying about me, for instance.”
    “I wish I could remember my father better,” Tria said. “According to my mother, he was an empty man. All charm and style and looks and