The Risk Pool

did. It wasn’t that I was particularly angry with him anymore. And it certainly wasn’t that I wanted to protect him from any guilt he might be feeling concerning her, since I wasn’t sure he felt any, unless you count as guilt a vague,general regret at the way things sometimes worked out. Rather, I didn’t want to open the subject of my mother’s condition because I knew I’d start lying to him. I couldn’t tell him that my visit had lasted all of five minutes; that after he’d let me out in front of the home at one, promising to return at three, I had discovered her frail and alone in the large communal dining room next to the long window that overlooked the rambling, shadowy grounds out back, where tall pine trees prevented the sun from melting the still deep snow; that I had not been permitted to just walk up to her like a son, but had to wait while she was “prepared” for me, her mind given the opportunity to adjust; that a nurse had been dispatched to tell her, startling my mother out of her meditation on the reluctant, wintry grounds beyond the protective glass; how she had listened for the longest time, not appearing to comprehend, then finally looked slowly around the large room until her gaze fell upon me beneath the tall archway, seeing there someone she was not sure she recognized.
    And who could blame her? I hardly recognized myself, having grown a couple inches in the seven months since she’d seen me last and become even more angular and birdlike as a result. Since going to live with my father, I wasn’t the same boy. I felt certain that I carried myself differently now, that my gait was altered, my mannerisms different. Had I swung my arms before, when I had been her son, the way I did now? Did I have, back then, my current habit of standing on one foot? Had I that sullen expression that sometimes surprised me in the cloudy bathroom mirror of my father’s apartment? I wanted to be her son again, if only for the afternoon, but I’d forgotten how and did not know where to begin.
    When the nurse finally motioned to me, I went toward them slowly. When I reached the table where my mother was sitting, the nurse took her hand and then mine, so that we could touch. “Jenny,” she said. “This is your son Ned. Do you know him?”
    “Why, yes,” my mother said. She had watched me all the way across the room, but the other woman’s question distracted her now and she looked away from me and up at the nurse. “This is my son Ned.”
    “And a very fine-looking young man,” the nurse said. “You must be very proud.”
    My eyes were already full, but the nurse took no notice. Instead she pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat me down nextto my mother. “Now I know how happy you are to see Ned,” the nurse said. “But you mustn’t forget to eat your lunch.”
    My mother was looking at me again and did not appear to hear.
    “Jenny?” the woman repeated, and this time my mother heard and looked down at her plate, which clearly had not been touched, a small square of something under a coating of tomato sauce, alongside some washed-out-looking peas and a tiny roll, all of it cold and unappetizing. “Would you like me to stay?”
    Only when my mother lifted her fork and slid it beneath the triangle of peas did the nurse leave us alone. I watched my mother chew the peas, her attention again drawn to the scene outside her window. “The snow won’t go away,” she said, as if this were a matter for concern.
    “It has, most places,” I told her.
    “Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter,” she said, then turned to me, smiling. “Good Ned.”
    Almost unbelievably, we stopped in at The Elms on the way home. Over the years one of the points I’ve debated about my father is whether he was in those days impossible or just very difficult to embarrass. Here it was less than twenty-four hours after he’d started a fight there; a normal human being would have taken at least a temporary leave of absence from its vicinity, especially since it wasn’t one of his regular in-town haunts anyway. True, Eileen worked there, assuming Irma hadn’t fired her for consorting with undesirables, and sometimes my father stopped in for a quick one before she got off her shift, but he had already demonstrated during the long months when he was broke that he could live without The Elms, where Mike got “some kind of a price for a lousy bottle of beer.” So, it seemed to me the easiest