The Risk Pool

to check myself out in the mirror. The face that looked back at me seemed less desperate than last night’s.
    I found my father stretched out on the living room sofa in his undershorts, his mouth wide open, snoring loudly. I watched him for a few minutes, amazed. If it weren’t for the noise, you would have sworn he was dead. I put index fingers in my ears and watched with the sound off, but only for a minute, because it was too spooky. His eyelids were not completely closed, and the liquid eyeballs appeared to move beneath them. I wondered if maybe he was just pretending to be asleep so he could watch me watch him, a possibility that made me too self-conscious to stay in the same room with him.
    Back in the bedroom, on top of the box that contained my socks and underwear, was a large brown bag that hadn’t been there the night before. Inside were an assortment of shirts, a couple pairs of pants, and a lemon-yellow windbreaker, all in plastic wrappers. I piled the clothing on the bed and studied it nervously to therhythm of my father’s snoring in the next room. Around him—never mind whether he was awake or asleep—I always felt a little slow, unequal to situations that should have been clear. Here was another. The clothing was my size and the bag that contained it had been sitting on top of the box containing my underwear. Surely these clothes were meant as replacements for what had been stolen the night before. A working hypothesis. I picked up each package and examined it in the plastic, less interested in the contents than the possibility that my father had rushed right out to buy me these things. If he had, the gesture might be interpreted as representing some affection for me, or a feeling of responsibility, at least.
    But where had the clothes come
from
? There were no tags and he had left the apartment long after the stores closed. It was now barely seven in the morning, two hours before they would open again. He simply
couldn’t
have purchased them in the interval. But if that was true, if they had been purchased earlier, then it was far from certain that the clothes were intended for me, since he could not have known that I would need them. Perhaps they were for someone else, coincidentally my size.
    One thing was certain, as it nearly always was where my father was concerned. There was a good chance that whatever conclusion I came to would be wrong and I would later be shown the stupidity of my reasoning, assuming I could even remember it when called upon. Still, it seemed to me that in the past I’d been more guilty of
not
jumping to obvious conclusions than jumping to erroneous ones. I had the impression that of the many character flaws my father privately noted in observing me, the most egregious was sluggish passivity. “Well?” I could imagine him saying, that one word containing a multitude of possible questions: How long do you intend to stand there in your undershorts? Can you figure this out, or do you need a blueprint? How many size-twelve sons do I have?
    I thought about putting on the same clothes I’d worn yesterday and pretending I hadn’t seen the others, but there were inferences to be drawn from this course of action as well. (So, I’ve got a blind kid?) The other alternative was to just stand there and wait for a nervous breakdown.
    In the end, I carefully unwrapped the package that contained a plaid shirt and removed the pins, saving them in a neat pile on the window ledge just in case. Then I did the same with thearmy-green chinos, which were a little long. I felt so nervous standing there in the new clothes that I decided I’d go for a ride and come back after he’d had a chance to wake up. The heat wave had broken during the night and the air coming in the bedroom window was chilly, so I put on the yellow windbreaker, grabbed my bike, and slipped out. My father’s snoring followed me all the way down to the sidewalk.
    The street was deserted, except for a few cars outside the Mohawk Grill. I pedaled slowly up Hospital Hill, and from there past the stone pillars and into Myrtle Park. I was glad for the yellow windbreaker, the air was so full of autumn. Up in the park, the sun only found its way among the pines in splotches. Since I had the place to myself, I raced along the winding paths until the chill in the air felt good, then rode over to my favorite vista and leaned my bike against a tree.
    Far out across the highway, the white jewel house I always admired gleamed