The Risk Pool

not caring much about the truth of it. “He just wants it to be true. He doesn’t know. His mother may not even know.”
    “He knows,” Tria said.
    “He believes,” I said.
    “So do I, then,” she said, even more stubbornly than before.
    “I’m going home,” I said after a long silence. “It’ll probably look different in the morning. If you imagine Drew Littler’s related to you, it’s because you haven’t seen him in natural light.”
    “He’s a horrible person, isn’t he?”
    I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I said, feeling immediately a deep twinge of conscience without knowing exactly why. Perhaps it was because this wisdom on the subject of Drew Littler was so conventional, universal even, that my contribution was unnecessary, even cruel. Perhaps it was because I had known him as a boy, before the verdict was in. Or that the part of me where wishful thinking held sway wasn’t sure the verdict
was
in.
    I slid down behind the wheel of my father’s convertible, my hand on the ignition key.
    “He mentioned you today,” Tria said.
    “Really?” I didn’t want to know what he’d said.
    “He said you were sweet.”
    “Sweet?” I tried to imagine Drew Littler saying that.
    “He said you hate choosing sides in things.”
    “He remembers the way I was when we were boys.”
    “Last night, I thought you were sweet,” she said.
    “And now?”
    “I think you’ve chosen sides.”
    I dropped the convertible off in front of the jewelry store, right where my father could find it in the morning. I’d started home on foot when the door to the tavern across the street was flungopen and my father came out and weaved across the street. He never noticed the car and wouldn’t have noticed me either if I hadn’t called out to him.
    “Hello, son,” he said seriously, his legs waffling.
    “I brought the car back,” I said, nodding to it.
    “There it is,” he said, apparently surprised to discover it so close. “Take it home. Bring it back tomorrow. The next day. Whenever.”
    “I’m going to walk,” I said.
    “Take it,” he insisted.
    I told him I really wanted to walk, and he shrugged. “You want to come up a minute? Crash here if you want.”
    “Nah,” I said.
    “Suit yourself.”
    “Listen,” I said. “This thing with Drew. You can walk away from it. He doesn’t want any trouble. He likes you.”
    “I know it,” my father said. “That’s the weird part.”
    “It’s
all
weird,” I said.
    “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Tell your dolly not to worry. I’ll take care of him.”
    “You know what he wants then?”
    “
Oh
yeah.”
    “Can’t you just get Eileen to tell him Jack Ward wasn’t his father?”
    “Kinda tough,” my father said.
    “Why?” I said stupidly.
    “Because he was. Probably.”
    Probably.
    In the end it was a mere word that sent me packing, in high moral indignation and fear, before the summer was over. In fact, I nearly left that night. I had a few hundred dollars saved, enough to get me a fair distance if I didn’t care how I traveled and didn’t mind ending up broke when I got there. And I didn’t care, not that night.
    It seemed to me, as I headed home along the dark quiet streets of Mohawk, that the whole world suffered from an epic lack of understanding, an epic surplus of probablies. Nobody knew what they needed to know, and because of it, things were slipping away. Inside the black houses that lined the streets, people weresleeping blissfully, the hot day having finally surrendered to reassuring breezes in the tops of the trees, but in a few hours tomorrow would dawn hot and, it seemed to me, tragic. Probably. After all, today had begun with Skinny Donovan’s death and ended with a series of reverberations, aftershocks from twenty-five years in the past. This time the night before, Tria Ward and I had sat together on the closed-in patio overlooking the city and watched the gathering storm. It will blow and blow and not amount to anything, Tria had said, but it did amount to something just the same, as she may have feared it would.
    A day later, I had not found the courage to go to her until it was too late, and now, as I headed toward my mother’s house along a sleepy street under a clear night sky, I was more than anything relieved. It was as if she herself had given me the antidote to loving her, allowed me the privileged glimpse of the beginnings of the transformation I’d long feared would someday take place. There in the