The Risk Pool

drink?”
    “VJ Day,” Mike said.
    My father tossed three twenties on the bar.
    “Sweet rollickin’ Jesus,” Mike said. “Go back out and come in again.”
    “Our friend working tonight?”
    “She’s off Thursdays. You know that.”
    “I forget.”
    Mike held one of the twenties up to the light, fingering it with his thumb and forefinger. “I heard somebody’d knocked over a Brink’s car yesterday. I never made the connection.”
    “We got time for a quick one, I guess,” my father said. Mike drew my father a tall glass of beer and poured a 7-Up for me while I was busy punching three songs into the jukebox.
    “So who’s this?” my father said when Duane Eddy came on. He always wanted to know who Duane Eddy was.
    Mike broke one of my father’s twenties, put the change on the bar. My father pushed it back at him, along with the other two twenties. “Let’s settle up,” he said.
    Mike took twenty-five, left the rest.
    “What?” My father frowned.
    “That’s it,” Mike said. “We’re square.”
    “Not close,” my father said. “Let me see.”
    “Trust me,” Mike insisted, but his eyes looked nervous to me.
    “Let me see,” my father said.
    Mike rang another No Sale and lifted the register drawer. Beneath it were a couple dozen tabs. Mike went through them till he found the one with my father’s name on it.
    My father surveyed the tab. The largest number, about midway down the column, was fifty-five, but it had been crossed out, along with each of the numbers beneath it, except for the last, which was twenty-five. Mike was red-faced.
    “So what the hell’s going on?” my father asked.
    “Take it up with your benefactor.”
    “You took money from her?”
    “She tells me it’s from you. How the hell do I know? You disappeared off the face of the earth.”
    “Drink your soda,” my father told me.
    “Don’t go getting sore for Christ’s sake,” Mike pleaded.
    “Did you ask her for money?”
    “Jesus, Sammy.”
    “If I find out you did …”
    Mike threw up his hands. “She says it’s from you. What do I know? Your old man’s a knothead,” he said to me.
    “Bullshit,” my father said, his eyes still narrow slits. I sucked the last of my 7-Up through the straw.
    “Have some dinner,” Mike said when he saw we were really going to leave. “You and the boy. I’ll spring.”
    My father left the twenty-five on the bar. “
You
give it back to her. And tell her you had no business taking it to begin with.”
    “Sure, Sammy. Whatever you say. Suit yourself.”
    “I will,” my father said. “I do.”
    We stopped at the market on the way to Eileen’s. My father wasn’t saying anything, and I knew what that meant. At the store he slung expensive roasts into the cart, causing people to stop and look at us suspiciously. By the time we got to the checkout though, the purple had begun to drain from his face, and he stacked the meat in a careful pyramid on the counter.
    “How are you, young lady,” he said to the girl at the register, who was too bored to answer.
    My father nudged me, his favorite conspiratorial gesture. My part in such conspiracies was always the same. To get nudged. I’d come to the conclusion it was all he thought I could handle. “Whatever became of the child labor laws in this state?” he said.
    The girl did not seem to think that this remark applied to her. I didn’t see how it could myself. She was small-boned, but hardly a kid.
    He nudged me again. “I’ll give you a dollar for every year over sixteen,” he said.
    “Okay,” I said.
    The girl rang the total, just over sixty dollars worth of standing rib, rolled pork roasts, hams, family-sized packages of groundbeef, all bleeding profusely. The girl made a face, said “yecch,” and dried her hands before bagging. “I’m twenty-five,” she told us.
    “You’re just saying that so my son won’t ask you out,” he said, nudging me again.
    Actually, she looked more apprehensive that
he
would. By the time she was done bagging, she had bloody hands again, and she reiterated her “yecch,” as if her condition were our fault.
    “It
will
wash off, you know,” my father said.
    She might have believed that if she hadn’t spied his black thumb and forefinger, which may have looked to her like the natural result of bagging too many bloody sirloin tip roasts.
    My father wheeled the convertible out of the parking lot and up First toward Myrtle Park. “She’s a pretty good girl,” he said.