The Risk Pool

called to witness her father’s greatness, and she accepted her calling, you see. I don’t know what she imagined her daughter’s role might be. To witness the witness, perhaps. To chauffeur the witness up and down the tree-lined drive, to the market, the drugstore, the grave. Before this last, people would mistake them for sisters.
    I looked everywhere for my father and finally found him, of all places, at home. Stretched out on the sofa, he snorted awake when I came in. Locking doors was foreign to his nature.
    “Nice place you got here,” I said.
    He looked around to see if this could be true. “You haven’t been up here before?” he said, and it was clear he honestly couldn’t remember.
    “Twice,” I admitted. “How about you?”
    He switched off the television, which had been keeping him company while he slept. “Not enough. From now on I’m gonna have to stay here a little more.”
    “Why’s that,” I said, rearranging some of the dirty work clothes he’d draped over the chair so I could sit down.
    “You want a beer?” he said.
    “Not really.”
    “Good,” he said. “We’d have to go to the store. Coffee?”
    He was rummaging through the tiny kitchen cabinets like an explorer.
    I told him no thanks.
    “Got some of that, someplace,” he said. “I’m never here except at night, and I don’t drink it then or I’d have to get up ten times.”
    He found a full jar of instant and held it up so I could see. I shook my head, said I was fine.
    “I bought it the last time I said I was going to start staying home. Then I went out and forgot about it.”
    “I had one in Tucson just like it,” I told him.
    “Think you’ll go back there?”
    I shook my head.
    “How come?”
    “Nothing there for me,” I admitted.
    “What’s here for you? You want to tend bar the rest of your life?”
    This seemed to me a rhetorical question, but I should have known better.
    “Do you?” he said. “Or work in some mill?”
    I said no.
    “Pretty much takes care of Mohawk, doesn’t it?”
    All true. And I
had
decided to leave, after all. I wasn’t even sure why I was in my father’s apartment discussing it. What was I hoping for? To be talked out of it? To be reassured that it was the only sensible course? To be given the opportunity to explain?
    “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Time I slowed down a step anyhow.”
    “Or two steps,” I said. “I don’t know how you do it every night.”
    He shrugged, as if it were a mystery to him too. “To hell with it. For a while, anyhow.”
    Neither of us said anything for a minute.
    “I’d like to go out right now,” he admitted, “but to hell with it.I was meaning to ask … was it Eileen that called you back in the spring?”
    I told him yes. I couldn’t think of any reason not to now. Even Sam Hall couldn’t get pissed off over a six-month-old indiscretion.
    “She’s a good girl,” he said.
    I said I thought so too. “In fact, you should make things up, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
    “I know it,” he said. “I think I’ll wait till Numb Nuts goes back to jail though. How long can that be?”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “How long?”
    Maybe too long, I thought, remembering Eileen’s remark that she was just about over my father. But I said, “Not too long.”
    “You’re damn right.”
    “Anyway,” I said. “I came over to cheer you up. Remember how you used to tell me Jack Ward was trying like hell to spend all the money he married?”
    “He couldn’t do it, either.”
    “Well, as it turns out, he did. Anyway, there’s nothing left now but the house and what’s in it.”
    “Don’t you believe it,” he said. “There’s some wells that don’t have bottoms. That’s one of them.”
    I told him what Tria’d told me, leaving out that she was working as a cocktail waitress, which wasn’t anybody’s business. But he wouldn’t buy a word of it. “Take my advice,” he said. “Wait till the old lady kicks off and then start digging in the flower beds. Keep digging till you find it. She’s probably got it buried all the way down to the highway.
    “It would be nice if you were right.”
    “I am,” he said, so confidently that I realized that I had challenged some article of his faith. “Some people are born lucky. You can’t do a thing to change it.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “You don’t believe that, do you?”
    “No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”
    “Well, it’s true whether you believe