The Risk Pool

were better than a floor show. Don’t offer Irma though, unless you want her to take it.”
    “All right, I won’t.”
    Eileen came in and sat down next to me. “How’s your mother?” she said.
    “Good,” I said, grateful to be spoken to.
    “Really? She’s getting better?”
    I nodded. Maybe it was true. When I’d left, the nurse told me that her eating in the dining room was a new thing, and that the dosage of her medicines was being gradually reduced. “She’ll be coming home one day,” the nurse had promised.
    Strangely enough, that was the last thing my mother had said.For the longest time she had stared quietly out into the deep snowy trees, so long that I had concluded that she forgot I was there. But then she had turned and taken my hand and said, “Be brave. Before long we’ll be home again.”
    By home she no doubt meant the house with the For Sale sign out front, the one that would be devoured by the cost of her care, whether or not my father signed on F. William Peterson’s dotted line.
    Some people came in and then some others. The Elms dining room began to fill. We were getting ready to leave when the door opened and the man from the white jewel house who sometimes came out and stared at Drew and me at the end of his long drive appeared. With him was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and she looked about my age.
    “Hey,
look
out,” Jack Ward said, squinting in our general direction. He was dressed wonderfully, like somebody from another part of the world who’d come to a modest party expecting an extravagant one. He was wearing a cream-colored, lightweight sport coat over a light blue shirt and peach-colored sweater and slacks. His shoes were white mesh. He was tanned, somehow (so was the beautiful girl), and his longish, light brown hair swept back from his high forehead and settled behind his ears as if each strand had been cut to a precise length and trained. “I think we’ve stumbled into the wrong place,” he said to the girl. “Look at
this
crew.”
    At the moment the whole crew consisted of Mike, my father, and me, and we were unsavory only in comparison to himself and the girl, it seemed to me.
    My father looked Jack Ward over critically. “Must be tops to be loaded.”
    “Sam,” the other man said as they shook hands, “it is. I recommend it to everybody. You remember my daughter Tria.”
    “I remember the little thing that used to bounce on my knee.”
    Tria Ward frowned and looked up at her father as if to inquire whether this could be true. But she did allow my father to put an arm around her. “Hi, dolly. Are you married?”
    Jack Ward had stepped away from his daughter’s side and made a circular motion to Mike with an elegant index finger. “And for yourself,” he added quietly. Magically, there was a crisp fiftybetween his middle and ring finger and he slid it across the mahogany as if he were proposing to Mike some secret transaction. “We can do this without fanfare, you and I,” the gesture seemed to imply. “It will be so quiet that no one will know that it’s been done, and that will be its beauty.” Almost as deftly, Mike spirited the money into the register before going to work, confident that Jack Ward did not intend for the money to sit there on the bar attracting attention to itself.
    What was most amazing is that I noticed any of this, because I swear I had not once taken my eyes off Tria Ward. I think I contemplated homicide against my father for putting his arm around her. Couldn’t he see how shy she was and how embarrassed to be hugged by an adult stranger in a dark lounge? How close to panic she was now that her father was no longer at her side? I was suddenly burning with indignation that my father thought he had the right to touch this lovely girl, herself as perfectly clean and fresh as her father.
    No, she told my father, she was not married.
    “That’s good,” my father gave her shoulder a squeeze. “You know, I happen to be available.”
    “You’re also just the sort of old goat she’s been warned about,” Jack Ward said, his grin displaying two rows of perfectly white teeth.
    “I tell you what,” my father said. “How about I introduce you to somebody your own age. He’s not as good-looking as his father, but you can’t have everything.”
    Suddenly, everyone was looking at me, as luck would have it, just as a song ended on the jukebox. Tria Ward gave me a weak smile, as if to acknowledge my reality, or