The Risk Pool

he looked angry just the same, and Irma stayed away from us entirely. “What’s the matter with him?” Mike said before returning to the bar.
    “Nothing,” my father said. “And if he doesn’t stop it in about two seconds …”
    “Forget it, buddy,” Mike said to me. “Your father’s all right. Everything’s all right.”

18
    “There,” my father said the next afternoon. “You feel better now?”
    The answer to that was yes and no, but I said yes and it appeared to satisfy him, that and cuffing me alongside the head. He put the convertible in gear and headed us back toward Mohawk.
    “I still don’t get it,” he said.
    I had blurted out, finally, there in the restaurant, when Eileen joined us, that I knew my mother was dead, that I just wished somebody would say it. They looked at each other in disbelief so authentic that I considered them the best pair of liars I’d ever run across. They worked on me for about ten minutes, but I wouldn’t budge. I was that sure. To unconvince me (and to show that there were no hard feelings) my father went back into the bar and fetched F. William Peterson. He looked pretty awful with his lip swollen up three times its normal size, even before my father explained the misconception I was laboring under, and then the poor fellow looked like he was going to cry. If he was lying too, he made my father and Eileen look like pikers. Which meant they weren’t liars, at least not on this occasion. Which meant I had some explaining to do. I started out with the For Sale sign and how it had made me think she was dead. Otherwise, why was our house being sold? And what was this talk about power of attorney and following her wishes? I explained how just about everything people had said during the last week or so had confirmed my suspicion, though now that I thought back over the various conversations, the evidence had been far from conclusive. It seemed to fit because I was convinced that my mother’s death was part of what I saw as my own downward spiral into neglect and ignominy. Naturally, since I saw both my father and Eileen as symptoms of that decline, I didn’t mention that more abstract fear to them.
    Now, of course, in the bright sunshine of a spring afternoon, I saw all of my hasty and erroneous conclusions concerning my mother in pretty much the same light as my father did—as bird-brained. The worst of it was that I had not trusted my own father. I had virtually accused him of withholding from me my own mother’s death. Blessedly, the stupidity angle bothered him more than any demonstrated lack of faith in him as a good, trustworthy father. Every time he thought of some other reason why my mother couldn’t be dead—like how come it wasn’t in the paper? Why didn’t anybody stop me on the street and say they were sorry to hear?—he trotted it out and examined my faulty logic further, as if he planned not to let the matter rest until I’d been officially entered in some sort of fool’s compendium.
    “There,” he said, pointing to a For Sale sign on the front lawn of a small brick house set back a ways from the wide Schenectady street, then to another house on his side of the road. “Look at all the dead people’s houses.”
    I didn’t say anything. Another few residential blocks and we’d be coming up on the Thruway entrance. Then there wouldn’t be any more real estate signs until we got back to Mohawk. Not that he would forget in the interim. The next sign he saw would put him right back on the same track, and it was easy to foresee that real estate signs were destined to be a reliable source of ridicule in the future. For Sam Hall there was no statute of limitations on other people’s idiocy. He may even have felt that there’d been a kind of unwitting justice in the whole circumstance. After all, as a kid I’d told people
he
was dead; now I’d unwittingly done the same thing with my mother.
    “Well?” he said, pointing out one last sign.
    What he was after, of course, was a smile, and I was holding out, as usual. Once he decided you owed him a smile, he just kept after you until you paid up. Normally, I would have given in, but I didn’t feel like smiling at him today. As soon as I gave him what he wanted, he’d stop razzing me and want to know about her, how she’d looked, whether we’d talked, what we’d said. I preferred the razzing.
    I knew it was cruel of me to want to withhold information about her condition from him, but I