The Risk Pool

me out to breakfast.”
    We went outside, single file—Eileen, then me, then my father. “Don’t talk to him,” Eileen said. “Don’t say a word.”
    The boy looked up, saw us, nodded knowingly.
    “Sam,” Eileen warned.
    But my father had already moved past her. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Zero,” he said. “I got a job for you.”
    The boy held up a greasy bolt for inspection. “Good. I get five bucks an hour.”
    My father snorted. “You’ll never get five bucks an hour if you live to be a hundred. Unless it’s to go away and not come back. In the meantime, there’s a big stack of dirty dishes in on the sink, and your mother’s worked every night this week.”
    “So?”
    “So when we get back from breakfast, it’d be nice to see them done.”
    “Ignore him,” Eileen said.
    “Don’t worry,” the boy said, his voice even more pointedly contemptuous of her than of my father.
    “Who buys your food?” my father said. “Who gives you a place to stay? Who bought you this motorcycle you couldn’t live without?”
    “Not you.”
    “No,” my father admitted. “But I’m the one that’s going to pound the snot out of you some day if you don’t start remembering.”
    There was a flicker of fear in the boy’s eyes, though he covered it quickly. “Someday, right Sammy?” he said.
    “That’s right.”
    Eileen had gotten in the car and she laid on the horn until my father turned his back on the boy. “The soap’s under the sink, in case you forgot,” he said.
    “I’ll think about it,” the boy said, and his eyes met mine before I could avoid them. His were sullen and dull now, as if he’d already had the snot pounded out of him and had never gotten over it.
    “The dishes will be done by the time we get back,” my father said quietly when he slid in behind the wheel.
    “I want you … to leave him … alone,” Eileen said, her voice a knife edge.
    “
I
want some breakfast,” my father said.
    I’d gotten in the backseat, and when he turned around so he could see to back out of the driveway, I instinctively turned around too, so I didn’t see the cuff coming. It caught me right on the cowlick. “Don’t grow up thinking you’re tough,” he said.
    “Like your father,” Eileen added.

12
    Until my father told me not to, I worried about Rose not being able to afford fifteen dollars a week to have me clean the salon. It was a lot of money, enough to make a wealthy man of me, even if I only banked ten a week. “Don’t lose sleep over Rose,” myfather advised. “She needs a wheelbarrow to cart all her money around.”
    I didn’t see how that could be. How much business could she attract up those three flights of narrow, unlit stairs over Klein’s Department Store? The only people who ever seemed to use them were my father and Rose and me. I understood only when I actually saw the salon that first Sunday. Rose’s business came up by elevator from the store below. Her ladies, most of them elderly, did their shopping and their hair in one trip. At closing time, an accordionlike mesh gate was closed and locked, preventing entry from the elevator. Similar grids were used in the department store on the two floors below.
    And my father was right. Rose had about the best business in town. That first Sunday he accompanied me to make sure I did the job right. It turned out he’d done the job himself when he was laid off. He showed me where the big vacuum and the cleaning supplies were. Then he showed me Rose’s big black ledger, which she kept in a poorly fastened drawer at the receptionist’s station at the elevator door. Along the left margin were the hours and half hours of the workdays—Monday through Saturday—and six columns across the pages which corresponded to the six chairs spaced evenly before the long wall mirror and individual sinks. For every hour and every chair at least one appointment was scheduled and dollar amounts recorded, sometimes in ink, sometimes lightly in pencil. We totaled up one day and multiplied by six to arrive at a figure for the week. I was so stunned by it that I went back over our calculations to find out where we’d goofed. We hadn’t though.
    “You should see the house she’s got up on Kings Road,” my father said, making himself comfortable with the racing form in one of Rose’s six reclining chairs.
    I doubted it could be as grand as the jeweled house on the hill across the highway from Myrtle Park.
    “Jack