The Risk Pool

cut the engine. A curtain in the small brown house at the end of the drive twitched, then was still. My father got out, so I did too, confused as usual. There was a front door, but we went around back where there was a large, unshaded concrete patio. A blond-haired boy in a thin t-shirt, who looked three or four years older than I, was working on a dismantled motorcycle, parts of which were strewn all over the patio.
    “Hello, Knucklehead,” my father said when the boy looked up. I recognized the boy as being from Mohawk High, but didn’t know his name. He was big and good-looking enough to notice on the street, even if the girls he let hang on him were ordinary to ugly. He stood straight, studied my father for a second, then pointed at his own dick with both index fingers.
    “Don’t say it,” my father advised.
    “She’s inside,” the boy said, bending to pick up a greasy wrench.
    “Say hello to Zero,” my father said, nudging me. “He thinks he’s tough.”
    “Hey,” the boy nodded at me for a split second before returning to my father. “I
am
tough.”
    “You just think so,” my father said.
    “Someday we’ll find out,” the boy said, tossing the wrench into the air, catching it nimbly by the handle.
    “Careful,” my father said. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
    “Leave him alone!” came a voice from one of the windows directly above us. I jumped, but my father seemed to be half expecting it.
    “You dressed?” my father said, mounting the concrete steps to the back door.
    “It’s almost nine-thirty. What do you think?”
    My father held the screen door for me and we went in. There was a woman my mother’s age at the kitchen sink doing dishes, about a week’s worth, it looked like. Soapy to the elbows, she studied my father critically, as if she suspected him of bringing her some more.
    “Just wanted to make sure,” he said. “I got a weak ticker.”
    “I hate to be the one to tell you, but it’s not your heart that’s weak.” She dried her hands and forearms and stood looking at him. She was a gangly woman, sort of pretty and not pretty at the same time, with lively eyes that conveyed both amusement and irritation.
    My father touched the coffee pot with the back of his hand and, finding it warm, opened an empty cupboard, looking for a cup. The woman tossed him a wet plastic one from the mound on the drainboard.
    “I’m Eileen,” she said, offering a red hand, “since nobody’s going to introduce us.”
    My father ignored her, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Didn’t work last night?”
    “Yes, I worked last night,” she said angrily. “Some people have to.”
    “I dropped by,” he said. “You weren’t there.”
    “Then you dropped by after eleven. I was early waitress. For once.”
    “Mike lose his head?”
    “Must have. You could have called. My phone still works.”
    “I got tied up.”
    “Mmm,” she said.
    I had drifted off during the conversation. As usual, everybody seemed to know my father better than I did, and I always ended up feeling like an outsider. It had been the same when I was a kid. My father and Wussy had talked between themselves for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch, and when I was finally spoken to I’d be surprised to discover myself still present, a palpable if relatively unimportant part of the scene. Now, for some reason, myfather and the woman called Eileen were suddenly looking at me, and I felt myself flush. “What?” I said.
    “What do you mean, what?” my father said. “Try and stay awake.”
    “Tell him to take a long walk off a short dock,” Eileen suggested to me.
    “If you don’t start being nice to me, I’m not going to take you out for breakfast,” he said.
    Eileen snorted. “Breakfast! Look at this mess.”
    My father shrugged. “Let Worthless do the dishes.”
    “That’ll be the day he ever does a dish,” Eileen said, glancing out the window to where her son knelt beside the motorcycle, her expression half affection, half exasperation.
    “He will if I ask him,” my father said.
    “You never ask him anything. The only thing you know how to do is threaten and call names.”
    “He pays attention, anyhow.”
    “That’s not the sort of attention I want.”
    “It would be a start.”
    Eileen grabbed a light coat from a wooden rack near the door. “Don’t go telling me about my kid.”
    “All he needs is his ass kicked,” my father smiled.
    “We won’t discuss it,” she said. “Shut up and take