The Risk Pool

whether he was in the present or back ten years ago on the night it had taken my father and Wussy and Skinny Donovan and his mother and, finally, a doctor with a horse tranquilizer to fell him into welcome oblivion. And he’d been smaller then. Now he was bigger than my father and Wussy put together, and there was no Skinny Donovan to kick him in the head if they were lucky enough to get him down, and no doctor handy with a long needle.
    My father was right. He was big as a house.
    All the lights were out in the Ward house when I drove up and parked in the circular drive. Mohawk, or a small part of it, glittered below and I cut the engine to listen to the quiet, hoping that Tria wouldn’t be asleep, that she’d peek out the window and see me sitting there in my father’s convertible. And not call the cops.
    Not that I’d have blamed her much if she did. It was after midnight, which made me about six hours late, by conservative estimate. Six hours during which she would have had time to consider what, if anything, our becoming lovers the night before had meant to me. I was about to drive back down the hill and into town when a lawn chair shifted on the small enclosed patio a few feet away and a cigarette glowed red and died. In the dark I couldn’t tell from the silhouette whether it was Tria or her mother. I didn’t want to be wrong.
    “I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.
    “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
    I climbed up and sat on the back of the front seat, unsure of my current status. “And a lot I do.”
    “I’ve regretted that about a dozen times today.” Her voice was silky in the dark and I suddenly had a different regret of my own.
    “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m sorry you feel that way. Because I don’t.”
    “It hasn’t occurred to you to wonder if I was on the pill?”
    “I
did
actually, once or twice.”
    “Well, I am, so you don’t have to worry. Or run away.”
    “Listen,” I said. “Can I join you? I feel like an idiot all the way over here.”
    “Stay there, then. Feel like an idiot.”
    I did. Both.
    “I’m the idiot,” she said after a minute. “We’re all crazy in this family.”
    Her use of the word “all” spooked me. After all, there was just herself and her mother, unless she was including her father in the equation. Or unless Drew Littler had convinced her to think of him as family.
    My eyes had adjusted to the dark now and I could see her better. She was barefoot and wearing a thin robe that reached only to the knees. Her dark hair was down around her shoulders the way I liked it.
    “Did I tell you why I left Swarthmore?” she said.
    “No,” I admitted.
    “I was on academic probation,” she said. “Valedictorian of St. Mary’s, class of ’67. Academic probation, ’68. Guess how much I studied.”
    “Don’t feel bad,” I said. “I never studied much the first couple years.”
    “
I
studied every night. Every minute.”
    If she’d planned to surprise me, she had. My own experience had been that even the appearance of industry could sucker a B out of most professors. Academic probation was strictly for alcoholics, scholarship athletes, fraternity men, and those who hadn’t discovered the college of education. “There are big differences between colleges,” I said, for something to say. “I didn’t go to Swarthmore, or anywhere close.”
    “You’re smart though,” she said. “I’m just smart enough to know when other people are smart. Daddy was smart. I remember that about him. Mother thinks she is, but she isn’t.”
    “Does it matter so much?”
    “Yes,” she said. “When people tell you that you are, and you believe them, and it turns out that you’re not, it’s important. It makes you wonder what else you’ve been wrong about. Maybe everything. I was told today that I had a brother I didn’t even know about.”
    “If you believe anything Drew Littler tells you then you’re right about not being too smart.”
    “I do believe him,” she said stubbornly, happy to have tricked me into admitting her stupidity. “So does my mother.”
    “No she doesn’t,” I heard myself say. “She just hates your father. It suits her to think of him as a continuing embarrassment. Now she’s got another cross to bear.”
    “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
    “Believe it,” I told her. “I’m smart, remember?”
    “Anyway,” she said. “It’s too terrible not to be true.”
    “You’re wrong,” I said,