The Risk Pool

moment we all just sat there, our back wheels well below the road, the front ones on the outer edge of the shoulder in launch position, looking at patches of dusky blue through the treetops.
    “We’d made it
very
near the top, you see,” Mrs. Ward said to her quietly weeping daughter, as if reasonable people hadn’t any right to anticipate a better result, really, since very few automobiles ever made it the entire way. She pointed toward the house, just now visible through the trees ahead, to illustrate her point. “And we were
very
fortunate to have your quick-thinking young friend in our midst.”
    Somehow I didn’t feel like I was “in their midst,” though I was certainly tagging along all right, and quite happily too, thoroughly full of myself, utterly content to consider that I
had
saved the day, and only vaguely troubled to recollect that when I had finally lunged across the big Lincoln’s front seat to throw the car in park, I had planted my left hand, for leverage, squarely in Mrs. Ward’s crotch.
    “And the car is totally without damage, you see, so there is no reason for concern or alarm on the part of anyone.”
    I was unclear whether this last was to reassure her daughter or to anticipate an unfair response on the part of Jack Ward, who, at that precise moment, appeared on the patio and discovered us, three abreast, entering between the stone pillars at the far end of the oblong drive. He came toward us at a strange gait, as if he wanted to run, but knew he wasn’t supposed to. With all due respect to Mrs. Ward’s confidently uninformed opinion, I doubted the Lincoln was undamaged, at least if the grinding, then thunking noise it made when forced into park was any indication, but it
had
come to rest without hitting anything, and that, anyway, was a blessing.
    “What’s wrong? Where’s the car?” Jack Ward wanted to know when he was close enough to inquire. He looked at us each in turn, spending a little more time with me, since my presence posed a second riddle he plainly hoped was unrelated to the first. Surely his wife and daughter hadn’t traded in a new car on a used boy?
    “In the woods, you see,” said Hilda Ward. “Be a dear and fetch it.”
    “What’s it doing in the woods? Who’s this?”
    “Resting,” said his wife. “This young man happens to be our savior, if you want to know … if you can forget your beloved car for the moment.”
    “Saved you from what?” Jack Ward said. He stood before us now, hands on his hips, clearly frustrated at not getting the kind of information that genuinely illuminated.
    “From Lord knows what,” said Mrs. Ward. “Injury. Disfigurement. Death. Do you care?”
    “Of course I bloody care. What do you think?”
    “Well, then. That’s gratifying. Do run along and get the car and let us catch our breath. Then, perhaps we’ll tell you about it, since you care.”
    The woman’s tone was halfway between mirth and malice, but Jack Ward seemed less puzzled by it than I. “Sweetheart?” he said to his daughter, and the lovely child buried her head in his shirt front. “Oh, Daddy!” she said.
    “You run along with your father, dear. Show him where to find his beloved. He mightn’t be able to locate it otherwise, you know. In the meantime, I’ll entertain our savior.”
    And with that she took me by the hand—with her own cool and ever-so-dry hand—and led me toward the white jewel house.
    * * *
    “Something cool” turned out to be a layered green parfait in a glass shaped like a tulip. Mrs. Ward took me into a huge kitchen, where a short, heavyset woman was whaling away at an innocent piece of pale pink meat with a wooden hammer. She did not look happy to see us.
    “This is Mrs. Petrie,” Tria’s mother told me with a wave of her hand in that woman’s general direction. “Mrs. P., meet the young man who just saved our lives.”
    Mrs. P. looked like, if this happened by some strange chance to be true, she would have had me summarily strangled by way of reward.
    “Do you imagine,” Mrs. Ward went on, apparently unmoved by the other woman’s murderous expression, “that something cool might be given him? Something ice cream, you know, or something soda? He could sit right here, I think, don’t you?”
    There was a large wooden island right in the center of the kitchen, and it was ringed on three sides by tall stools. Overhead, suspended from the ceiling, hung a wrought iron circle from which a dozen or so gleaming