The Risk Pool

and (considering Eileen) the kindest thing in the world to give Mike and Irma wide berth for a few penitential weeks, at least until the sharp edges of their current and completely understandable resentment were worn smooth by other concerns.
    But no. Back we went, like iron filings to a magnet. I could feel myself glowing scarlet with shame when we pulled into the nearly empty parking lot. It was late afternoon, in between the big after-church wave and the smaller early evening one. I could tell by my father’s gait that he saw no reason we shouldn’t be a welcome antidote to the late Sunday afternoon boredom that wassure to have gripped the place, especially if the basketball game was one-sided and the previous evening’s exhaustion imperfectly banished. To his mind, we were just what the joint needed. If Mike and Irma wanted to remember something about the night before, let them recall how he’d washed glasses and sliced fruit. He’d bailed them out, and maybe it was time they showed a little gratitude.
    Pretty clearly though, gratitude was not Irma’s first emotion when we appeared in the doorway of the dark lounge. She was seated at one end of the horseshoe bar next to her husband, who was hanging dripping cocktail glasses upside down from the overhead rack.
    “You’re gone,” she said, looking first at my father, then at Mike. “You hear me? He’s all done here.”
    She was sucking on a maraschino cherry, its stem rotating in the gap between her large front teeth. Mike shrugged like it might be true. He didn’t even give me the usual quarter for the jukebox. Eileen appeared in the doorway to the dining room, shook her head in amazement, and disappeared again. The dining room was practically empty, except for two busboys clearing and prepping tables for the dinner crowd.
    My father winked at Mike and put an arm around Irma’s big shoulders. “Let’s you and me ditch this stiff,” he stage-whispered. “We’ll go throw down a blanket in the walk-in cooler. Like the old days.” Then he took the maraschino cherry stem and pulled.
    “Git!” she elbowed him hard in the ribs, though not as hard as she might have. He held his ground.
    “Your trouble is you just need a little of the old innee-outee,” he said. “Relax you a little, so you aren’t so mean all the while.”
    “How the hell would you know what I need?” she said, but even I could see she was loosening up under his outrageous onslaught.
    “I’m the expert,” he said.
    “You’re the eighty-sixed expert. Go be expert someplace else. Kill somebody else’s business.” She took a toothpick from the glassful on the bar and jabbed the back of my father’s hand with it, slipping neatly out of his embrace. “He’s history,” she warned Mike again.
    When she was gone, Mike slipped me a quarter for Duane Eddy and my father went around the bar and got himself a bottle of beer so Mike wouldn’t get in trouble.
    “You better watch out,” Mike warned him. “She ever takes you up on one of your offers you’ll be one sorry son of a bitch.”
    My father shivered at the thought. “I don’t know how you do it,” he admitted, his voice full of genuine admiration.
    “What,” Mike said. “I haven’t been as close to her as you just were in a month. I never come out from behind here you know.”
    “I don’t blame you.”
    “How did she get that way is what I always wonder.”
    My father shrugged. “It could have something to do with the fact that every time you get a couple grand ahead you take it to Vegas and come home without it.”
    “Think so?”
    “Yes, I do. Take her with you sometime. She works hard too.”
    “I always have more fun with you.”
    “I can’t help that.”
    Mike studied me, then returned to my father. “He looks better today, anyway.”
    “Took him to see his mother. We just got back.”
    “How is she?”
    “Better, according to my source. I’m the only one not allowed in.”
    “She should have been so smart fifteen years ago.”
    “She’s not so smart now. It’s our buddy with the fat lip that had it fixed. I so much as walk in the front door and I’m in the caboose.”
    “You figure he could fix it so I’m not allowed to see Irma?”
    “Probably.”
    “You cost me a round of ten drinks and two complete dinners, you know.”
    “You want some money?” my father offered.
    Mike waved goodbye to the idea. “The guy comes in once in a blue moon. Everybody else enjoyed it. I always said you