The Risk Pool

the best place in which to search for lost faith.
    I hated to see her go to Colorado for the holidays because I was very afraid she would not come back. She and her mother, who had never been close, were lately drawn together by the similarity of their misfortune—their status as victims—and I feared that the older woman’s resignation and withdrawal, however understandable, would attract Leigh as a posture for coping. She had begun to talk of quitting her job instead of taking the maternity leave she was entitled to, and going someplace where you could breath the air. The morning I accompanied her to La Guardia I began to prepare myself for the phone call that seemed inevitable. Her voice would be more distant than Colorado when she assured me that I wouldn’t have to do anything, that she’d already called the mover, that a date had been fixed for the van if I would just gather her things in some out-of-the-way place so they could be got at. I wouldn’t even have to miss work.
    This was the call I was expecting when the phone rang and my father’s voice, much closer than Colorado, crackled on the line. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to be home. How come you aren’t visiting your mother?”
    “Because she lives in California,” I said. “That and about a hundred other reasons.”
    “I know a few of them,” he said. “You want to run up for a day or two?”
    I didn’t, really. The cumulative effect of my recent weekends in Mohawk, as well as of leaving my mind there when I returned to the city, was that I was behind in my work. With the city shutdown for the holidays, I had thought to get caught up. At least a little.
    “I could,” I told my father. “Maybe the week between Christmas and New Year’s, if that’s all right.” I was already thinking of possible excuses to use later to put the visit off until after the first of the year.
    “Doesn’t matter now,” he said. “I’m all done.”
    My chest knotted up like a fist. “What do you mean?”
    “No more,” he said, as if he imagined that this equally ambiguous phrase cleared matters up. When I didn’t say anything, he finally added, “I’m cured. You don’t have to act so surprised. I never promised to die. I just figured I would, that’s all.”
    I still couldn’t find words. The last time I’d spoken to him he had been discouraged. The size of the tumor had been reduced, but he had lost another five pounds, his blood count was off, his skin even more jaundiced. His doctor had balled him out too, told him to get serious, that he could only safely administer two more treatments without ensuring the destruction of all his healthy organs. He had to start eating whether he felt like it or not. Eat and exercise and nothing else, or it was all for nothing.
    “The tumor’s shrunk?” I finally managed.
    “Not shrunk” he said. “Gone.”
    “That’s astonishing.”
    “That’s what I said. I said are you sure you got the right chart, Doc. I’m a sick man. He said not anymore. Showed me the X ray and everything. Last couple treatments did the trick, apparently. I’m clean as a whistle. He says go home and don’t smoke and you might live to be a hundred.”
    Right then, I think I believed he would. Almost incredibly, it seemed he had beaten the odds again. If Sam Hall had a specialty, that was it. I remembered the rack of pool he’d shot against the skinny kid in the thin t-shirt, coaxing his far superior opponent into a scratch off the eight. Then there was the afternoon he had arm-wrestled Drew Littler on the kitchen table, putting all two hundred and fifty pounds of raw youth flat on his back. Not to mention Normandy, the survival of which was surely the greatest trick of all. What other name was there for it? Not luck. Not skill. Not even craft, exactly, because craft was something you could call upon routinely, whereas my father was able to summon whatever it was that he sometimes summoned only when the situation was seemingly hopeless. Only then could he be counted on to findthe combination. I remembered his old promise to Eileen, that he’d outlive everybody and bury her under Nathan Littler’s obelisk.
    “You don’t have to worry, though,” he said. “I won’t live to be a hundred.”
    “It’s fine with me if you do,” I told him. “Be two hundred.”
    “Your dolly there?”
    “Yes,” I said before I could think, responding to a reflex that did not want to admit to him that she