Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

In the silence of the car ride, Mary Beth pledged to herself that her child would never be a latchkey kid, shrugged off to the auxiliary world of gum-chewing teenaged sitters in their baby tees and low-riding sweatpants. Putting Gabriel first among all things was going to be this year’s main resolution. It was already part of the arrangement at the office, the reason Mary Beth arrived at 9:30 and departed at 3:00 and took liberal amounts of time off for parent-teacher conferences, doctor’s appointments, Cub Scout meetings; she left early to deposit him at soccer practice in the fall, T-ball in the spring. She had no desire to be a superwoman.

Nothing could ever become more serious with Mike, at least not while they worked together. She was tired of the power differential—he knew too much about her, her past, her family situation, even her checking-account balance. But to her, he remained impenetrable. She had little idea about his finances, his previous loves, where he’d gone to school, whether he’d been raised in a church. Which meant the New Year was as good a time as any to reconsider everything, a time to pursue every option. She was going to remain his employee for the foreseeable future, for practical reasons: health insurance, flexible hours, the stable routine that she so desired for her son. But in the passenger seat of a rented Jeep Cherokee, she made another resolution for the New Year. She’d put her résumé together.

Once their car fell into the flow of the minimal traffic of a holiday lunchtime, Mike let out a sigh and said, “Christ, I’m getting fat. These pants are killing me.” He hooked a thumb into the waistband of his weathered chinos, the ancient garment soon to be retired to raking leaves on a Saturday, touching up the paint in the garage.

“Too much red meat,” Mary Beth said.

“Too much everything. We’re starting a new regimen as of today. Fruits, whole grains, something. An austerity program.”

“How is this surprising? You give your life over to doughnuts and pastries at a breakfast meeting, a large coffee with cream and three sugars on the way back to the office, something from the drive-through for lunch. Someone leaves the firm or has a birthday or makes the big sale, and there are brownies in the kitchen at midafternoon, but you don’t finish the second brownie because you’ve got to hurry up and get out to a happy-hour meeting with some guys from Blue Cross or Travelers or something.” Mary Beth cracked her window, taking refuge in the cool air ruffling through her bangs. She knew just by saying it out loud that she was really talking about herself.

“Exactly. I bought this muffin last week. Banana oat bran. It sounded healthy, at least. Except that after I finished it, I decided to look at the nutrition label. And it says calories per serving are something like six hundred. Serving size, one-third of a muffin. Who eats one-third of a muffin? It’s not like I’m going to split it with a couple of people at the office. Of course, all this information came too late for me to do anything about it. Plus, it was roughly the size of my head.” Mike laughed at his own joke, the sound escaping from his prominent nostrils. When she didn’t answer, he droned on. “The hazards of sales, I guess. But now is time to make changes. I don’t want to be one of those fifty-two-year-old guys who suddenly has a doctor telling him to give up meat, booze, cigars, and fucking or else he’ll be dead by next Thursday. What do you do then?”

“Find a new doctor,” she said, laughing.

Mike ignored her vaudeville line. “Anyway, the program starts today. All things in moderation.”

Mary Beth offered a quiet buzz through her lips, an agreeable hmmm.

“I’ve made progress already. Back when we met, I used to eat dinner standing up. I didn’t have any furniture except for a television and this ancient recliner, and so I’d order takeout and eat standing up at the kitchen island while I watched Monday Night Football . Not going to do things like that ever again.” Mike turned the radio on, then lowered the volume and asked, “Any resolutions you want to share?”

Mary Beth wondered if he meant something about her weight. Mike had never given her a reason to think this, at least nothing he’d said. But she lived with her own self-consciousness every day, making an effort to distract attention from her midsection with her somewhat overdone makeup and outlandish accessories. Today that meant a sweater in Popsicle orange and an oversize silver nylon purse stuffed with magazines, trail mix, throat lozenges, and travel-size tissues for the trip home. “Nope. Nothing. Anything I’m going to change is something I’m going to just do. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it’s an improvement.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe I’ll get a couple of pink stripes dyed in my hair. I don’t know.”

“I’d like that,” Mike said, with a touch of a leer.

“Or not. I never tell people my resolutions. That way they don’t judge me if I don’t follow through. All my life I’ve felt like I was moving toward something inevitable. In high school, college was inevitable. After college, it was a job, and then, when I was married, I thought I was moving toward being a mom. Then in about two months, I got pregnant and divorced, and abandoned in Texas, not really knowing a soul.”

“But that’s just the point. You don’t get to know what’s next.”

“But I’ve always known what’s next. My life has been moving from one obvious thing to the next. When I came to work for you, for a while, doing well at the job, having a career, that became inevitable. But now, it’s like I don’t know what I’m supposed to be going for. And I’m not sure I want to make any specific plans right now. I’m going home, and I’m going to enjoy the rest of my week off. The only thing I’ve got planned is doing whatever Gabriel wants to do.”

“So you’re worried about things being inevitable,” Mike said, repeating the word a few times. “ Inevitable. Sounds like the name of a ghost town.”

She didn’t want her malaise to be what he would think about as he drove away. She tried taking a lighter tack. “Or a place to build your dream house. You can get your mail general delivery. Mike Renfro, Rural Route One, Inevitable, Utah.”

Mike veered toward the off-ramp that fed them the final mile to the airport. “I can’t believe that’s all you’ve got planned.”

What Mike really wanted to know, she assumed, was how Mary Beth might fill the days without him. She did not want to provide the disappointing specifics—she’d fall back into the same routine she had every week, whether or not Mike was involved. Laundry, an inventory of her son’s clothes, some light shopping, organizing her receipts for tax purposes.

Mary Beth visualized the framed picture she kept on her desk, one taken right after she gave birth. Gabriel nestled on her chest, the cotton cap that the nurses stuck on diagonally trailing across his forehead. He had been fussy, jaundiced but loud, a wailer, really, until the nurses put him back with his mother. That first moment of quiet—that was what that picture was about. But the lack of photographs from the rest of his life felt directly contrary to MacMurray family tradition. Each year of her childhood, her parents had added another formal portrait, an eight-by-ten from the latest special at the Sears photographic studios. Her father and her brother in matching navy pinstripe suits from J. Press. They made an evening of it, got their picture taken, rewarded themselves with dessert from Baskin-Robbins.

Mary Beth’s father kept pictures of his two children under the glass top of his desk, rotating in selections from a new batch maybe once a month—school photos: Richard in his basketball warm-ups, Richard in the basement, tinkering with one of his arsenal of guitars, Mary Beth with her glockenspiel in the marching band, her forehead and eyes obscured by the rise of her white wool hat, a giant cotton swab on top of the Green Giant–colored uniforms.