The Risk Pool

living room where he was parked in front of the snowy television. I stood in the doorway between the two monstrous rooms, unsure what was expected of me. “You want something to drink?” he said.
    I said no.
    When I headed for the door, he wanted to know where I was going. I said, to get my other box of clothes.
    “Come sit down. We can get it after the news.”
    I did as I was told. When the news was over, he asked if I was hungry.
    “There’s no stove,” I said, because there wasn’t.
    “The diner’s right across the street.”
    I wasn’t sure how that rendered a stove superfluous, but to my father’s thinking it apparently did. He was looking at me as if he found me about as odd as I did him.
    “It’s not nice like your mother’s,” he admitted.
    I again felt tears beginning to well up and I didn’t trust my voice to say it was fine, it was all fine.
    “I’m not like your mother,” he went on. “That’s what you’ll have to get used to.”
    When I didn’t say anything, he looked over and cuffed me in the ear. “Don’t worry about her. She’ll be all right. Don’t go through life crying about things.”
    “All right,” I croaked, disobeying.
    Eventually he remembered the other box of clothes and went down after it. He was too late though; the backseat of the convertible was empty, and I could hear him cursing in the street below
    “Don’t worry about it,” he said when he returned. “Don’t cry over what you can’t help.”
    I wasn’t crying anymore anyway, so I took his advice, though it seemed to me that letting my clothes get stolen fell under the heading of things that
could
have been helped. And there were probably other things, too. My mother, for instance.
    He insisted that I take the bed. In the morning we would “get things straightened out,” whatever that meant.
    I undressed quietly and got into bed. On the other side of the unshaded window, Mohawk stretched outward, from the blank face of the building opposite, dusky above the streetlamps, then further up into the darkness of Myrtle Park, finally into the blackness of the night sky itself. I hadn’t much faith that the kind of straightening out my father had in mind would be all that beneficial to anybody, not after the way things had been straightened out with my mother that afternoon. We had driven there straight from The Lookout, and when we pulled up to the curb he told me to stay put. His plan was to tell her that this would just be temporary, that she could get over whatever was wrong with her better if she didn’t have any headaches for a while. Meaning me.
    So I sat out there in the convertible, half expecting either gunshots or a police car to come careening around the corner to carry him off. Instead, in a very few minutes, he returned and said I’d better go in and get what I needed. He looked shaken and I felt suddenly chilled. Never before in the history of our family had there ever been an amicable settlement. Could it be that my mother had actually agreed to let me live with him? If so, she was even sicker than I had imagined, and it came home to me then that the only reason I had agreed to live with my father was that I knew she would never go along with it.
    Up and down the street the leaves on the maples had begun to turn, and suddenly I did not want to leave. The modest neighborhood houses all contained whole families, it seemed to me. Ours had always been different, containing just my mother and me. That my father had learned to live without us was a fact I had become accustomed to. Us. My mother and me. Now it appeared that she had decided things would be better without any headaches, as my father put it, and it occurred to me there in the car, and later that night in my father’s bed, that maybe the problemwas me. Maybe it had always been me. She had taken all she could, and now I was being handed over. It wasn’t a question of me deciding who I would live with. All that had been settled, and my life, in that instant, was changed. It was agreed that I would visit her on Saturday mornings, go to the bank for her like always so she would have money for the grocer’s delivery boy. That was all she needed.
    She had retreated to her room when my father and I went back to fill up the two cardboard boxes from my dresser drawers. We worked quietly and quickly, like burglars, walking on tiptoe past her closed door.
    After we had deposited the boxes in the backseat of the convertible, my father, to