The Risk Pool

“You ever get a chance to do her a favor, you do it.”
    For a moment I thought he was referring, inexplicably, to the checkout girl back at the market. Then I realized it was Eileen he was thinking about and probably had been thinking about since we left The Elms.
    “She’s not pretty, like your mother,” he conceded, as if he imagined I’d found his preference in the matter puzzling. I turned and stared out the window, my eyes filling. We’d stopped speaking of my mother by mutual unspoken agreement. My father had brought me to visit her in the Albany hospital only once. I’d wished he hadn’t. There’d been even less of her than the Sunday morning at the Old Nathan Littler Hospital when she’d been little more than a ripple of flesh and bone beneath the otherwise placid sea of sheets and blanket. The afternoon we visited her in Albany she had looked like a child, her long hair chopped at the nape of her neck, her arms bruised where she had been hooked up to the machines that monitored her vital signs. A nurse had explained it to me, assuring me that the crisis had passed, unaware that I knew nothing of any crisis, was unaware that her heart had stopped beating briefly during the week and that she’d been revived. Unaware that our turning up that particular weekend had been pure coincidence.
    My father had waited in the lobby, and I was too frightened by what I saw to say anything to him. When he asked me how she was I told him good and made up a small conversation about how she’d said she would be coming home soon and that we’d live together again. It was a week later when I learned the details ofmy mother’s brush with death. I was summoned to the principal’s office during home room. When I saw F. William Peterson there and the principal said why didn’t we use his office, my throat got tight and I could feel my eyes filling, until the lawyer made me understand that it wasn’t what I thought, that he had come to tell me she was out of immediate danger now and was being transferred to a nursing home in Schenectady, where I could go see her whenever I wanted. I didn’t tell my father about this either.
    “She’s a good girl, though,” my father was saying. I didn’t have to turn my head to know that he was looking at me. When we pulled up into the driveway, he let me look up into the dark woods of Myrtle Park for a minute before delivering the cuff to the back of my head that I was waiting for.
    “Stop crying,” he said.
    I did. I wasn’t, really, to begin with. Just scared I might start.
    “What’s the matter?”
    I said nothing was the matter.
    “I’m not going to marry her, if that’s what’s eating you.”
    It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn’t much better.
    “You can if you want,” I said.
    “Thanks,” he said.
    In the distance we heard the sound of a motorcycle approaching, and my father shook his head. “I’d cry too, if I thought I’d end up with Zero for a brother.”
    We got out of the car.
    “Smile,” he said. “And smooth your hair down.” It always stood up where he cuffed me. “You look like the village idiot.”
    There wasn’t much danger of my being mistaken for the village idiot with Drew Littler around. When the motorcycle fishtailed into the drive, its rider was so bundled against the cold that it could have been anybody. Anybody crazy enough to ride a bike in February with the temperature in the twenties. It hadn’t snowed in several days and the streets were dry, but the sloping dirt drive was spotted with patches of ice that had been a problem even for our car, which was now blocking the open garage, tall snowbanks close on both sides.
    The boy throttled down and waited on the rumbling cycle. Myfather made no move to get back in the car. Instead, he began to unload the groceries from the backseat, balancing the first bag precariously on the slanted hood. Drew Littler gunned the engine once for emphasis, then raised his goggles. “You want to move that trash heap?”
    My father ignored him, handing me one of the bags of groceries. We went around and in through the back, leaving him at the foot of the drive, gunning his engine.
    Eileen was waiting for us inside. “Move your car,” she told my father. Her voice had a sharp blade on the end of it.
    “Okay,” my father said. “Mind if I set these down first? You figure His Royal Highness can