The Risk Pool

to the end of her discomfort. I knew her thinking though, and did not, for once, make matters worse by proposing again. That she had come back filled me with hope, and I didn’t want to ruin New Year’s Eve.
    The quiet restaurant I’d chosen turned out to be anything but quiet, and the dark corner table I’d envisioned turned out to be in the center of the dining room. The place was still hopping at ten o’clock. People we didn’t know stopped to congratulate us on Leigh’s condition. We were sent a bottle of champagne by an elderly couple in the corner booth I’d hoped for, along with instructions that I was to drink most of it.
    I was worried about Leigh, but I shouldn’t have been, because she did fine, as if she’d discovered that the attentions she’d been trying to avoid were not to be feared after all. We had a good meal and everyone seemed to understand when we decided to leave ten minutes before the new year’s arrival. We were escorted to the door by a dozen or so revelers and well-wishers, including the elderly couple who’d sent over the champagne. They offered to share a taxi with us, which we politely declined, explaining that we lived only a few blocks away. It had stopped snowing by then and as we walked slowly along the dusted sidewalks we listened to the mixed sounds of several parties cascading down from the apartments above.
    And so the new year was ushered in without much help from Leigh and me. The clock above the refrigerator said five after midnight when we came in, and we undressed and climbed into bed without reference to the future and without making a single resolution, together or individually regarding it. When the lights were out, Leigh began to cry, and I let her until she felt betteror, failing that, felt like stopping. “She’s a horrible woman,” Leigh said finally. “Small and mean-spirited and self-centered. I don’t blame Daddy a bit.”
    “Well …” I began.
    “Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to be comforted. I just want you to know that I’m just like her. If you marry me, I’ll probably end up driving you to somebody else, and then I’ll blame you for it and so will everybody. You’ll even blame yourself.”
    “What do you want?” I said. “Do you want me to promise not to blame myself?”
    She thought about it. “I don’t want to be my mother. I want to be who I want to be.”
    “Fine,” I said, stroking her hair. “Your wish is granted.”
    I heard the first ring as I stepped into the shower, but Leigh was there to answer it, so I climbed in anyway. She had started her maternity leave the last week in January to wait out the final few weeks in our warm apartment. It was now the first week of February and we were in the middle of the longest stretch of subzero weather since they’d started keeping records. It was the kind of demoralizing cold that I imagined had caused my grandfather to capitalize “Winter.”
    Leigh slid the shower door open partway and peeked in. “Hello there.”
    “Hello,” I said.
    “You know anybody named Norm? Sounds like long distance.”
    I started to say no, then realized who it was and got out of the shower.
    “You know where the Albany VA is?” Wussy’s voice crackled in the receiver.
    I said I did.
    “Then you better get on up there.”
    I sat down. “Not again?”
    “Everywhere, this time. Or so I hear. Sorry, Sam’s Kid. I figured you’d want to know.”
    The oxygen mask that covered my father’s nose and mouth clouded, then cleared, then clouded again, tracking his sleeping respiration. His face was gaunt and yellow and rich with grayingstubble. Even now he had most of his hair, though it had become patchy in the month or so since he’d called to tell me he was cured. The most dramatic change was in his body, which now occasioned little more than a ripple beneath the covers of the hospital bed. The arm that was connected to the I.V. was thin and dry and jaundiced. According to the nurse, he would be waking up soon when the pain killer he’d been given that morning began to wear off.
    On the wall opposite his bed was a print that depicted a New England winter. In the foreground a horse-drawn wagon was emerging from a covered bridge, below which stick figures were skating on the frozen river. I don’t know how long I’d been studying it when my father said, “That’s some goddamn picture, isn’t it?”
    He’d removed the oxygen mask so he could speak, but he immediately replaced