The Risk Pool

disappear inside.
    It was a little early on a Sunday morning for visitors. We had few enough in any season, and I wondered if this might be one of the men from the black sedan who had once been looking for my father. I shut down the vacuum cleaner and listened. The walls were flimsy and I could hear voices across the hall, but they were vague, like voices in a cave. I thought I heard my father say, “He’s next door,” but I couldn’t be sure. They were there for five minutes before the door opened and my father limped out into the hall in nothing but his shorts.
    “Let that alone for now,” he said when he poked his mussed head in.
    “I’m almost done,” I objected, certain now that the man was a policeman, that the items I had stolen from Klein’s Department Store had been missed, the unlocked door discovered, the correct inferences drawn. I must have gone very white.
    “You can finish later. We gotta take a ride.”
    To the police station, I thought, illogically, since that was only half a block away. I pulled the vacuum cleaner plug out of the wall and studied the floor, unwilling to move.
    “It’s your mother,” I heard him explain, as if from a long way away. “She’s in the hospital.”
    It was F. William Peterson who had come to find me, though I never did find out how he himself learned of my mother’s breakdown and hospitalization. Of course, news in Mohawk traveled fast, and it would have been more of a mystery if he had
not
heard, eventually. In fact, my father had heard part of the story the night before at The Elms, where Eileen worked as a waitress, but he hadn’t believed it. She had finished her shift and they were having a drink when Darryl somebody—my father couldn’t remember his last name—came in drunk and walked right over to the table where they were sitting.
    “You hear about your wife?” Darryl Somebody said.
    “Don’t
you
have nice manners,” Eileen observed.
    “Okay, forget it,” the man said. “Screw it, in fact.” Then he went over and sat at the bar beneath the inverted cocktail glasses.
    My father had wanted to get up, but Eileen didn’t like trouble, especially where she worked.
    “Where does he get off …?” my father wanted to know.
    “He’s drunk,” Eileen said.
    But Darryl Somebody had Mike the bartender by the sleeve and was telling him a story. From time to time they glanced over at the table where my father and Eileen Littler were sitting.
    “Let’s go,” Eileen said. “I’ve had enough of this place for one night.”
    My father motioned for Mike to come over. Sam Hall was personal friends with about half the bartenders in the county.
    “What’s
his
problem?” my father said, indicating Darryl Somebody, who was studying his beer, now that he had no one to talk to.
    “No problem.”
    “What.”
    “Forget it, Sammy.”
    “Ask him if he’d like to tell me all about it outside.”
    “He claims he saw your wife wandering around downtown in her robe and slippers. Kept stopping people in the street and said she was looking for ‘him.’ When they asked who, she just smiled.”
    My father nodded. Darryl Somebody was watching them now, smiling vaguely.
    “You must be confused with your own wife,” my father suggested across the room.
    “I haven’t got no wife,” Darryl Somebody said.
    “Surprise, surprise,” Eileen said.
    The two of them left then, though my father insisted they wait a few minutes in case Darryl Somebody came out. But either Mike advised against it or my father’s reputation as a skilled bushwhacker had preceded him, because Darryl stayed right where he was.
    The reason I relate all this is that my father did, right there in the front seat of F. William Peterson’s big Olds on the way to the hospital. Eileen he didn’t mention by name, but I knew it had to be her. F. William Peterson listened to the whole tale politely, concealing his irritation. No doubt he too felt the absurdity of my father’s detailed rendering, as if Sam Hall’s reasons for refusing to believe what turned out to be true were more important than the reality of my mother’s pitiful condition. That’s the way he’ll tell it, even if she dies, I remember thinking. It will always be
his
story, about how he hadn’t believed it could be true, about how nobody who knew my mother
could
have believed it.
    When we got to the hospital, my father ran into someone he knew in the lobby, someone who wanted to know if he’d heard, and when he