Read Online The Risk Pool by Richard Russo - Free Book Online Page A

accepted what she couldn’t change, who did the work of both a mother and father, who did whatever was required of her without complaint. He could tell all this from the altar, just by looking at her, though she usually sat halfway between the vestibule and the altar in the darkest section of church beneath the fifth station of the cross. She never took Communion, a fact that was much puzzled over and commented on among the sparse congregation. Neither did she go to Confession. She was a contradiction, oftenattending weekday morning masses, which were not required, without ever, to use the terminology of Sister Matilda Marie, who taught catechism, “partaking of the Mass, His Body, His Blood.” How odd she looked, now that I think back on those days, kneeling there in the nearly empty church, first light just painting the stained-glass windows, among the dozen or so elderly women with fleshy throats and gnarled fingers tracking noisy rosary beads. But my mother, I suppose, was also a widow of sorts.
    I never gave her much thought until Father Michaels said what an extraordinary woman she was. I loved her, I suppose, but the way ten-year-olds love, arrogantly, aloofly, without much urgency. She was the constant in my life; she made sure I had clean underclothes in the top drawer of my dresser, that the meat in the freezer got defrosted in time for the dinner she would have to cook when she got home from the telephone company.
    Father Michaels wanted to know all about our life together, so I told him, understanding only then in the telling just how unusual that life was. When I explained our daily routine, he guessed immediately my mother’s most pressing concern—the approaching summer. Something would have to be done with me when school let out. I was nearly old enough to be self-sufficient—to make my own sandwich at the noon hour—and nearly mature enough to be trusted. But not quite. Though quiet and studious and shy by nature, I was beginning to show signs that troubled my mother. I admired Elvis Presley, for instance. Especially his hair. Neither the man, his hair, nor his music seemed worthy of admiration to my mother, who forbade me to carry the slick black Ace comb in my hip pocket, the purpose of which was to subdue a stubborn un-Elvislike cowlick. No, I needed looking after. In the past we had relied on Aunt Rose for July and August, but this year she had hinted she might like to go away for the summer, explaining that she had not been out of Mohawk since the war. She’d seen pictures of the national parks out west that made her want to see them for real and find out if they could be so pretty in real life. My mother found the notion of Aunt Rose in Yellowstone ludicrous, but she knew what her cousin was trying to tell her. She didn’t want the responsibility for an eleven-year-old boy for an entire summer. Forty-five minutes a day was all right, because she could feed me coconut macaroons and turn on the television, but she couldn’t imagine how to keep a boy my age entertained during a whole summer. She loved children andit was the great sorrow of her life that she hadn’t had any, but I wasn’t really a child anymore, and I certainly wasn’t
her
child.
    One morning, Father Michaels suggested I introduce him to my mother. She had left immediately after mass, however, so as to be in time for her ride to work. It was only a few blocks to my school and I was used to walking them alone. So I suggested that Father Michaels come by that evening when she got home from work. He could have dinner with us if he liked.
    By afternoon, of course, I had forgotten all about my unauthorized invitation, and we were just sitting down to a dinner of beans and hot dogs when a car pulled up outside. My mother feared all automobiles, because my father had one, though this was not his most effective distinguishing characteristic, since everyone we knew owned a car but us. Even Aunt Rose had a Ford. She never took it out of