Somebody Owes Me Money

4

My father had papers all over the dining-room table again. He had the adding machine out, ballpoint pens scattered here and there, and lots of crumpled sheets of paper on the floor around his chair. When he’s thinking hard he tends to scratch his face, scratching his nose or his chin or his forehead, and frequently he forgets he’s holding a ballpoint pen at the time, so after a session at the dining-room table he winds up looking like the paper they use for dollar bills, with little blue lines an inch or so long wig-wagging all over his face.

“I’m late,” I pointed out. “It’s after seven.”

My father looked at me in that out-of-focus way he has when his mind is full of numbers. Pointing a pen at me he said, “The question is, are you going to have any children?”

“Not right away,” I said. “Did you put anything on for dinner?”

“If you would just get married,” he said, “it would make it simpler for me to figure these things out.”

“I’m sure it would,” I said. “Maybe I will someday. What about dinner?”

He glared at me, meaning I’d broken his train of thought. “Dinner? What time is it?”

“After seven.”

He frowned and pulled out his pocketwatch and lowered his brows at it. “You’re late,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Did you start dinner?”

“I got involved in this,” he said, waving his hands vaguely at all the paperwork. “Another insurance man came by today.”

“A new one?”

“Same old stuff, though,” my father said. He threw the pen on the table in disgust. “The math still works out against me.”

“Well,” I said, “they’ve got computers.” I went out to the kitchen and got out two turkey TV dinners, put them in the oven, lit the oven.

My father had followed me out to the kitchen. “They’ll make a mistake someday,” he said. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Not computers,” I said.

“Everybody,” he said. “And when they do, I’ll be ready.”

It is my father’s idea that he is going to beat the insurance companies. As the years have gone by, the insurance companies have competed with one another by presenting more and more complicated insurance packages, the packages getting steadily more intricate and unfathomable, with expanding this and overlapping that and conditional the other. Of course, whatever the package the odds are still with the company. Insurance companies, like the casinos in Las Vegas, are in business to make money, so the edge is always with the house. Except that my father is convinced that sooner or later one of the companies is going to come out with a package with a flaw in it, that the complexities are eventually going to reach the stage where even the company isn’t going to be able to keep up with the implications of the math, and that some company is going to put out a policy where you don’t have to die ahead of time to win. My father’s hobby is looking for that policy. It hasn’t showed up yet, and I don’t believe it ever will, but my father has all the faith and obstinacy of a man with a roulette system, and more often than not I come home to find him and his papers and his adding machine all over the dining-room table.

Actually, it’s a harmless enough hobby and it does occupy his mind. He’s sixty-three now, and he was forcibly retired from the airplane factory when he was fifty-eight — he worked in the payroll office — and if he didn’t have this insurance thing I don’t know what he’d do with himself. Mom died the year my father retired, and naturally he didn’t want to go off to Fort Lauderdale by himself, so we kept on living at home together, and it’s pretty much worked out. My parents were both thirty-four when I was born, and I was also an only child, so I never knew either of my parents when they were very young and we never did have much of a lively, exuberant household, so things aren’t so much different from the way they always were, except Mom is gone and I’m the one who goes out to work.

Anyway, while we waited for dinner I told my father about my day, and every once in a while he’d put his head on one side and squint at me and say, “You wouldn’t be telling me tales, would you, Chester?”

“No,” I’d say, and go on with the story. I finished by saying, “And the upshot of it is, I didn’t collect my nine hundred thirty dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“It sure is,” I said. “I wonder who I collect from, now that Tommy’s dead.”

“I wonder where you go to get the money now,” he said.

“That’s what I said,” I said.

He raised his head and sniffed. “Aren’t those dinners ready yet?”

I looked at the clock. “Five more minutes. Anyway, I’ll call Tommy’s wife tomorrow and ask her. She should know.”

“Ask her what?”

“Where I go to collect my money,” I said.

He nodded. “Ah,” he said.

We went on in and had dinner.