The Risk Pool

cowlick for a man of his years. For some reason the cowlick grew faster than the rest of his close-cropped hair. Either that or he asked his barber not to trim it. Wussy had intimated that the man was not considered gifted, even by local standards, and a first glance tended to confirm that impression.
    “Have you seen the pictures outside?” Eileen said when we broke off our embrace.
    “Pictures?”
    “In the entry. Look when you get a chance.”
    She hadn’t introduced her husband, and the little man was making exactly no headway angling himself into our immediate vicinity. Apparently Eileen was of the opinion that he wouldn’t earn acknowledgment until he’d shown sufficient skill at angling to appear in her peripheral vision.
    When I asked her how she was doing, making the question sound as casual as possible, she said so-so, and forced a smile, adding, “All things considered. It’s good that I did what I did when I did it, if you know what I mean.”
    I glanced at the little man again, who had heard his wife’s elliptical remark and stopped angling a moment to consider whether it might apply to him.
    “I do,” I told her.
    Then she surprised me by saying, “I was in Albany one day last week and thought of you.”
    This too was apparently news to her husband, who now had another riddle to ascend before he’d even established a toehold on the first.
    “I had a distant relative in the hospital,” Eileen went on. “She didn’t recognize me at first. I almost didn’t recognize her either. I was glad I went anyway.”
    By now the little man had made it almost into our presence, and his brow was furrowed with perplexity. “How’d she turn out?” he said.
    Eileen faced him now as she might have to confront a child who isn’t trying. “She died!”
    The man reacted as if to a stiff jab. “Well, it wasn’t me who killed her,” he said.
    “Ben,” Eileen said, “this is Ned. You can talk to him for five minutes. Then leave him alone.”
    “Sure, babe,” Ben said, checking his watch.
    “Mike looks like he could use a hand,” Eileen said, and before I could say anything, she’d gathered half a dozen empty glasses and returned them to the bar. I couldn’t help smiling to myself, remembering how she’d fallen to at Jack Ward’s funeral. And wondering as I often had, what, if anything, Eileen had told her son about his father’s identity. My own father, despite his “probablies,” didn’t seem to know for sure it was Jack Ward, and it seemed doubtful that Eileen would have told Drew. But had she, in a moment of lonely pride and need, told the boy that his father was not someone to be ashamed of, but rather a wealthy, important man? Had the boy picked up and catalogued a detail at a time from her offhanded remarks (It’s his father he gets his good looks from, not me) ending up with a composite sketch that Jack Ward fit? Perhaps. But if it
was
Jack Ward, it now occurred to me, then in all probability Eileen had nothing to do with her son’s terrible knowledge. It would have been his father, acting on an impulseat once redemptive and self-destructive, who was responsible. I suddenly saw Jack Ward behind the wheel of the first of his shiny new Lincolns pulling into Eileen’s steep drive, and encountering there on the porch a boy of six or seven with dark, liquid eyes, a boy who at that age was already wondering. And when he saw this strange, handsome man at the wheel of the shiny car, the boy felt something undeniable tightening inside him. This is the one, they would both have thought at the same precise moment, and when Jack Ward lost his nerve and quickly backed the Lincoln out into the street before the boy’s mother saw, he could never have suspected that those dark, liquid eyes had already etched him too deeply, that this boy would remember and follow, years later, just as the boy’s mother, inside, could have had no way of knowing that she’d lost her son forever.
    This was the way it must have happened, or so it seemed to me that afternoon of my own father’s send-off. I watched Eileen as she gathered glasses efficiently, putting right the mess, and thought it a shame that a lifetime of falling to didn’t get you more, though it had apparently gotten her Ben, who now, instead of facing me, had turned so as to stand shoulder to shoulder with me, flexing at the knees, as if to suggest that he’d decided in my favor. If a fight broke out, he’d be with me, I could count on