The Risk Pool

your money out back?”
    “It’s in the bank,” Mike said. “In Vegas. In somebody else’s account. What’s the matter with him?”
    Him was me. I was pretending to read song titles on the jukebox.
    “Some damn thing,” my father said. “He won’t talk till he’s ready.”
    “I wonder where he gets that from.”
    “Not his mother. She’d talk whenever.”
    Eileen came over.
    “Don’t look at me like that,” she told my father after rattling off a long order.
    “Like what.”
    “Like it’s my fault. What’s wrong with him?”
    Silence. Shrugging, probably. All three of them staring at me now. I read song titles.
    “Anybody ask him?” Eileen said.
    “I’m fine,” I said, a little too loud, still not turning around.
    “You could say hi, after you get that jukebox memorized,” Eileen said.
    I punched in “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog,” a song I knew she hated, but Eileen was gone with a trayful of cocktails high over her head before it could come on.
    “Sit here,” my father told me, indicating the bar stool he’d laid claim to. Rolling up his sleeves, he went around to the other side of the bar. “We’ll see if we can’t get a free meal off this tight son of a bitch.”
    By nine the place was even more crowded than when we came in. My father washed glasses and sliced fruit for the frozen daiquiris while Mike and the other bartender poured and rang the register.
    A woman I couldn’t see, seated somewhere on the far side of the room, kept cackling, “I
love
it, Jesus, I LOVE it!” her voice somehow clear and distinct above the din.
    Eileen came in from the dining room, saw my father and grinned, then told Mike she thought she might have to take somebody named Karen into the girls’ room and break her face. Mike said he’d give her a raise if she did. Irma, Mike’s wife and the restaurant’s hostess, appeared in the doorway a moment later, and pointed a dangerous-looking finger at him. My father saw this and advised Mike to just run away. “I LOVE it,” the woman in the far corner howled.
    “What do you figure she loves, Sammy?” Mike said.
    My father started to answer, then remembered me and didn’t.
    Around ten, a well-dressed party of a dozen or so came in and I recognized F. William Peterson among them. He didn’t notice me, but started visibly when he saw my father, who was rolling his sleeves back down now that Mike and the other bartender hadthings under control again. Eileen came in and said she’d arranged for a table in her section.
    “You see your buddy?” she said.
    “Yep,” my father said.
    “Kindly remember I work here.”
    “So do I,” my father said, showing her his wrinkled hands; even the blackened thumb and forefinger looked soft and porous. “We’ll sit a minute. We’ve waited this long. Irma’s gotta let you off eventually.”
    My father took out some one-dollar bills and handed me a few for Liars. We’d played only a couple when a drink arrived and Mike said guess who. “Shall I say thank you?”
    “If you want to,” my father said.
    In a few minutes F. William Peterson came over. He looked quite relieved when he saw me, probably figuring that meant my father wouldn’t start trouble. “Sam,” he said. “Ned.”
    “Well?” my father said.
    “So,” said the lawyer. “What do you think?”
    “What do
I
think?” my father said. “I think there are four threes.”
    “Have you talked to Ned?” the lawyer said.
    “Every day. He lives with me.”
    So, I thought. This is how it will come out. I will be officially informed of my mother’s death in a noisy bar. Then we will go in and eat dinner. My father will explain that he’d been meaning to tell me, that he was waiting for the right moment, that it was just like F. William Peterson to mess things up, like he’d been doing for how many years now? How old was I? Right. For damn near thirteen years he’d been messing things up.
    F. William Peterson’s face was red. “I guess I don’t understand your objection.”
    “It’s like I told you before,” my father said. “You tell me what you’re going to do with the money and it’s all yours. Just don’t give me that crap about it being her wishes. You may have bullshitted her into giving you power of attorney, but you aren’t bullshitting me. You can
have
the money, like I said. I just want to know what you and your doctor buddies are going to spend it on, that’s all. You’re all going to the Bahamas? Fine.