The Risk Pool

person who bought it, may have been his thinking. And that’s probably why she wasn’t having any part of our carnivore peace offering. The set of her jaw had my father looking like a scolded dog, an effect my mother had never been able to achieve. He had always fought with her the way you would with a man, stopping only at the very brink of physical violence. He never treated her with the sort of care you use with something you considered fragile. And that’s what struck me at the time, because Eileen was the one who looked sturdy. In fact, when I saw that dark look on her face as she slung roasts against the back wall of the freezer, it scared me, and I remember wondering if maybe it didn’t scare my father too.
    But I don’t think so. I think he saw something I couldn’t see back then, and his expression was a little like the one he’d worn the afternoon we’d gone in to tell my mother I was going to live with him. It was as if when he looked at Eileen, he saw my mother the way she’d been that day, so broken inside that she couldn’t stop shaking.
    “A roast would take two hours,” Eileen said.
    “So?”
    “So it’s six now. So I don’t feel like doing dishes at ten o’clock. So.”
    “So don’t. I’ll do them.”
    “My house. My dishes,” she said. The freezer was full now, and when she tried to slam the door by way of punctuation, it justswung back at her. The second time she put her weight behind it until the whole refrigerator rose up an inch or two off the linoleum.
    “You want to go out someplace?”
    “Sure,” she said. “Why not? You’re done baiting my son. Let’s go out to eat someplace nice. Like where I work, maybe. While we’re there, you can threaten my boss, maybe.”
    “I wasn’t baiting him,” my father said. Only the first part of her complaint had registered. “He could have waited until we unloaded the groceries, in as much as he’s the one who’s going to eat them.”
    “Somehow I got the idea
you
were here for dinner.”
    “Not if you don’t want us,” he said, looking even more hangdog.
    The “us” made my presence official, and they both looked at me for arbitration. I would have flushed if the recent blow to my groin hadn’t drained all the blood from my face.
    “Ned can stay,” she said. “At least he’s no troublemaker.”
    “Neither am I. I just brought you some groceries. If I’d known that would upset you …”
    The television was on in the next room, so I went in there and sat down on the sofa, glad to be alone. Eileen always kept the room dark—because it was so ugly, she said—the only light emanating from the television screen. In this relative privacy I slipped a hand into my trousers to check myself out. The year before, a boy in my class who had been picking his nose on third base had taken a line drive in the crotch and he had swelled up sufficiently to require special underwear. I hadn’t actually seen him in this swollen condition, but I’d heard the matter discussed in the locker room before gym and a boy had lifted his own member to remind us of the size of a normal testicle, this compared to the big fist he put next to it. Going strictly on feel, mine still seemed about their usual size, but I couldn’t be sure.
    By cracking the blinds, I could watch Drew from the sofa, though it had grown dark outside. He too seemed to have lost the edge of his anger. He had shoveled all around the bike, leaving it a shiny island. He was now engaged in carving out some of the snow beneath the cycle so that he could plant his feet and gain some purchase. After a few minutes the bike was mostly free, though still magically reared up, frozen in place. Tossing the shovel aside, he stood before it, blowing on his hands, seemingly lost in thought.
    I’d spotted for him enough when he benched in the garage to know what he was doing. He was collecting himself, preparing. Breathing. Swelling his muscles, as if in a mirror. Studying his own steamy breath, feeling the power surging in his body until he was certain it was equal to the weight of the bike. I watched with genuine anticipation when he finally bent to the task, knowing that he intended more than simply dislodging the bike and rolling it forward into the garage. My father’s taunts were eating at him, and I didn’t need to see his broad forehead to know that the blue vein was pulsing there. I could visualize his expression, too, his contempt for whatever he was up against. He put