The Risk Pool

nodded, still looking at me. “Your kid like to work?”
    “Ask him.”
    “I’ll give you fifteen bucks to clean the salon on Sundays. Wash the sinks. Vacuum. Empty the trash.”
    “Sure,” I said. Fifteen dollars was a lot of money. My mother had only made eighty-three a week at the phone company.
    She looked over at my father. “I been trying to talk your old man into doing it, but he’s too good. I never knew he had such a handsome son.”
    I was confused again. The woman never seemed to look where she was talking. When she took a bright key off her pink rabbit’s foot key chain, I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to keep it or give it to my father. The key seemed to be mine, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to trust me with something like a key. I’d never even had one to my mother’s house, and until today I had belonged there.
    But Rose seemed confident she’d done the right thing. “You look responsible. Not like your old man.”
    “There you go,” my father said when she disappeared around the corner at the landing below. “Now you’re employed.”
    My father’s apartment had clearly once been part of the department store below. The inner walls which separated the various large rooms were of different construction than the outer onesand did not go all the way up to the ceiling, which was very high and peeling green paint. The living room was huge, its dimensions further emphasized by the fact that my father appeared to have next to nothing to put in it. He leaned my bike up against the wall near the door as if he were grateful for the additional furniture. An old sofa floated in the middle of the room a good fifteen feet from the nearest wall, placed there, apparently, to be within shouting distance of the television in the corner, a monstrous piece of pale cabinetry for such a small screen. For some reason it was already on when we walked in. A television was one of the things I’d often yearned for and which my mother and I did without, though she insisted that it was a question of preference. She’d just rather listen to music on my grandfather’s old Victrola. My mother wasn’t the sort of person who needed a point of comparative reference to know what she preferred. In general she preferred not to have what we couldn’t afford. Still, even I wasn’t sure this TV of my father’s represented much of an improvement over our antiquated radio at home. The screen was so full of snow that the difference between Huntley and Brinkley was purely auditory, and the events they reported were all played out against a backdrop of intense blizzard. Along the wall opposite the television was a sink, a small refrigerator and a two-chair Formica dinette. That was it.
    “Well?” said my father, when he discovered me still in the doorway with my box of underwear and socks.
    The bedroom looked even more absurd. Containing just a small set of drawers and a single bed, it was the same size as the living room, and our steps echoed off the walls when we entered. “Drop that someplace,” my father said.
    I looked around for the right place. There was room for about five hundred boxes. Finally, he took it out of my hands and dropped the box where we stood. “There,” he said. “Easy.”
    “You gotta go to the bathroom?” he said, as if I looked like I might.
    I said I didn’t.
    “You probably will eventually,” he said. “It’s in there.”
    I nodded. I could see the commode from where we stood, and part of the tub. It looked like we had one normal-sized room, anyway.
    “You can sleep in here.” He motioned to the bed. “I usually fallasleep on the couch anyhow. You sure you don’t have to go to the bathroom?”
    I didn’t, but I went in anyway and closed the door behind me. I sat on the commode with the top down and wondered if I would be able to hold back the tears. On the small sink sat a cluster of my father’s toiletries. His toothbrush lay on the spotted porcelain next to his razor and cologne. A white puff had hardened at the end of the can of shaving cream. The narrow gray bowl had just enough flat surface to accommodate what was already there. I sat, waiting for the minutes to pass so I could flush the John and go back outside. Looking up, I noticed that even the bathroom walls did not go all the way to the ceiling. It was not an ideal place to pretend to relieve yourself.
    I flushed before leaving, but it was a wasted gesture, my father already having gone back to the