The Risk Pool

and when the priest turned up the block toward Our Lady of Sorrows, he got a good view of the backyards all down the block. He spied me sitting up against the back wall of the shed and stopped. There was a fence between us, so he couldn’t come over. We looked at each other for a minute, and he raised his hand in a half wave. I made him waitbefore raising mine. And I only gave in because he looked like the saddest man in the world.
    My mother and I went to the nine o’clock mass on Sunday, and I hoped, for the first time ever, that it would be the Monsignor’s service. We got there early and the church was practically empty, like a weekday mass, except that the sun was high and the light from the stained glass windows illuminated the whole church without the aid of the overheads. My mother looked a little like one of the stained glass windows, radiant and colorful in a summery dress. She wouldn’t have been able to hide in the shadows even if there had been any. Her mood was irrepressibly good, just like Saturday’s. I had tried to damage that mood both days, and I knew it couldn’t be done. “When will Dad come see us?” I had asked her.
    “Hard to say,” she admitted. “We’ve been lucky so far.”
    But having said that, she relented a little and took my hand. “I know you can’t forget him,” she said. “He
is
your father. But you shouldn’t take everything to heart so. I know you want to think he loves you, and maybe he will someday. When someone loves you,” she went on, “you don’t have to wish for it to be so. You just know it is.”
    “Well, I know,” I told her.
    “No, you wish. You have to be careful of wishing. It can hurt. It’s better to wait until you know. Waiting for your father to turn up won’t make him do it.”
    I didn’t care for that answer, so I withdrew my hand.
    “You needn’t take it out on me, in any case,” she said. “If you wanted
me
, it
would
help. I’d know, and you wouldn’t have to tell me. That’s the way it is between people who love each other.”
    Then her eyes got a faraway look and it was like talking to somebody who wasn’t there.
    I figured I’d be the first one in the sacristy, but Father Michaels was already there, and if that wasn’t strange enough, he was already fully vested and praying at the kneeler beneath the window, which nobody ever used except to stack things on. He didn’t appear to notice when I came in, which was fine with me. I got my cassock and surplice on, lit the low mass candles, carried the red Bible to the pulpit, turned on the correct overheads. All this took ten minutes or so, and when I got back to the sacristy, he wasstill at the kneeler staring off into space. I wondered if the minds of priests wandered when they were praying the way mine did. Sometimes, if I was just an extra on the altar, without any specific duties to stay alert for, I’d drift away and miss just about the whole thing.
    He noticed me this time and got up quickly. “Ned,” he said with satisfaction, and he smiled at me so warmly I decided not to be mad at him anymore. He couldn’t help not being my father and he hadn’t meant to disappoint me by being at the breakfast table when I had in mind a different sort of man entirely. Right then, when he smiled at me, I decided it would be better if I had dreamed the dog barking and the footsteps on the stair and the light beneath my mother’s door. All day Saturday I had thought about whether or not I had dreamed it, and now I decided I had. He offered a hand, and I took it.
    “Are we ready?” he said.
    “Sure,” I said, “but we’ve still got ten minutes.”
    “You’re right,” he said, glancing at the clock. “I suppose we have to wait.”
    With five minutes to go, the sacristy door blew open and three other altar boys came in, laughing and shoving each other, then making a point of desisting.
    “Ned will serve,” Father Michaels said, much to everyone’s surprise, when we were all assembled. Of the four, I had the least seniority, and normally I would have been assigned to guarding the sacristy door. Though considered competent to serve at weekday mass, boys of my age and limited credentials were thought unequal to the same task on Sunday before a packed house, which had been known to give even the steadiest hand the shakes at bell-ringing time. I flushed at the breach of decorum, and the looks on the faces of the older boys spoke plainly that no such travesty would have been