Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Why didn’t Mary Beth take more pictures of her son? God knows every young couple these days managed to document their child’s most mundane achievements on video: first steps and first day of school, sure, but also first day of chicken pox, first solo shit. Sometimes on sales calls he had to watch and pretend to be enthralled by the ordinary things, just because they’d been committed to video. He much preferred the snapshot era he’d grown up in, four-by-four Kodachrome prints, the month and year stamped at the bottom edge. Permanent memories.

Mike had taken the last photo of his own father, Artie Renfro, sitting in a plastic lawn chair, the collar of his camp shirt loose enough that the fabric fell away to reveal his tracheotomy scar. Was it an exaggeration for Mike to think that he’d photographed death itself, Artie gaunt in the way that only the chronically ill can be, savaged by esophageal cancer and its poisonous treatments?

On his dad’s knee sat a half-drained bottle of Lone Star, the last basic pleasure he could tolerate. Mike was fourteen, maybe fifteen—he could not remember without doing the math—and the camera was his father’s old Brownie, the kind with a flash-arm attachment; the picture had to be taken outside because the night before, a bored Mike had gathered all the flashbulbs and thrown them up in the air, shot them with a pellet pistol, watching the phosphorescent burst rain down on him like fallout. Mike did not know how to load the roll of 126 film; his father had to do it, beer sheltered between his legs. Artie wanted a picture of his scarred throat. His “war wound,” he called it. But his shaking hands spilled his beer, and his cursing, his retreat inside for a dry pair of slacks—that last picture almost didn’t get taken at all. Instead, his father returned a few minutes later wearing dark-brown pants, the same pair he wore in all of Mike’s memories. Artie eased himself down into the chair with a sigh, a slight grimace that the adult Mike knew he should have understood as a sign of metastasis; the tumors had spread to his pelvis, his lower spine. He took a sip from a new beer and flinched, as if the beer had turned on him, and he turned to Mike and said, “I can’t even enjoy this.”

It would have been nice to have a snapshot of him and Mary Beth on New Year’s Eve, but he didn’t own a camera, and his father was the reason.

Now, as Mike Renfro drove along the access road at the entrance to Salt Lake City International Airport, the silence became a third passenger in the car. He wanted the comfort of small talk, an assertion that everything was okay. He pointed to the mountains that rose on Mary Beth’s side of the highway. “They look like a rib cage, don’t they?”

“Oh, yeah. We’re right in the belly of the beast,” Mary Beth said, then pulled down the visor and squinted at her reflection in the makeup mirror. “Sorry. I just don’t feel much like being profound right now.”

The flatlands around the airport glimmered in the direct wash of the noonday sun, the light dancing in reflection across the fuselages of the various jets. Mike pulled to the curb lane in front of the terminal and shifted into park, let the engine idle. He hurried out of the car, fetching Mary Beth’s bag and leaving it in front of the curbside kiosk. In the background, the public-address system alternated between issuing the usual red-zone parking warnings and paging random travelers: Mr. Agajanian, Tamar Shelton, Captain Cliff Ellis.

Mary Beth stood in front of Mike. “I should call my brother and wish him a happy New Year. I didn’t even talk to him on Christmas.”

“How is Richard these days?”

“Still trying to save the world, I guess. Or remake it in his own image. I haven’t talked to him in a couple months. You’re back in the office Friday?”

Mike nodded. “You’ve got my cell phone in the meantime. But I can’t imagine there’ll be a reason to call. At least not work related. The billing is done, and no one’s working the rest of the week. Take Monday off and let the voicemail pick up everything.”

“I just might do that. Take Gabriel to school and have a day of leisure.”

“An excellent plan.” Mike turned to the rear passenger door, opened it, and handed over a black plastic bag. “It’s not much. Just a little something for the boy.”

Mary Beth reached into the bag and, with the flourish of a stage magician, extracted a stuffed brown bear with ears that stuck out in half-moons from the nine- and three-o’clock positions on its oversize, nubbly head. The bear had a pink T-shirt that said UTAH in letters of raised felt. “He’s kind of, I don’t know, pathetic. The bear equivalent of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree,” Mary Beth said, showing her warmest smile. She felt a bit like a salesperson, certain Mike would see through her facade.

Mike thought of the bear as slightly off, defective yet charming; it seemed cruelly blunt to admit that the bear, with its large head and protruding features, could remind him of a six-year-old, a comparison that was, at the least, honest, but one he knew he could never explain to the child’s mother. That Charlie Brown comment was exactly how Mike pictured Gabriel; he was the kid flailing at a yanked-away football, knocked ass over teakettle off the pitcher’s mound by a screaming line drive. But Mike knew that Mary Beth could understand how the bear’s defects, even his ears, might seem endearing.

“I don’t know if I ever told you about Whit Carrboro,” he said. “My first boss, with this agency in Houston. I go to this conference one time and I see this promotional bear, and I take one because he looks a little like a bear I had when I was three. Back in the office, I prop the bear up against the electric pencil sharpener in the corner of my cubicle, behind the phone. One day at a staff meeting, we come in and the boss hands out this memo outlining the proper decor of cubicles. And specifically outlawed are stuffed animals or other quaint items. ”

“Well, this one is very cute,” Mary Beth said, giving the bear a hug. “When my brother was a kid, he used to take all his bears into his crib and pick the fuzz off their heads until they were bald. He’d stop and hold up the bear and say that now that all the fur was gone, the bear looked like Dad.”

“Hopefully this guy will get to keep all his fur. It’s just a little something. A quaint item. So, will I see you on Friday?”

“I promise. You’ll have the weekly schedule on your desk. The accountants come in around ten-thirty.”

“I don’t want to drive away thinking that the last thing we talked about was work.”

“What else are we going to say? That’s the beauty of it, don’t you think? I finally met someone smart enough to know that there’s no point in talking something to death when it’s already dead.” She shook her head at the end of the sentence; her memory felt edgy, vibrant, her anger justified. It wouldn’t be until she was in her seat on Flight 503 that she would realize this: she’d talked to Mike the same way her ex-husband used to talk to her.

There wasn’t a lot of bustle for the middle of the day, no three lanes of traffic, no diffident-looking flight attendants sharing a smoke with ticket agents and airport cops, just two drivers in red tunics sitting near the terminal’s automatic doors, keeping a watchful eye on their hotel-shuttle vans. They weren’t listening. Neither was the skycap, standing a discreet distance behind Mary Beth’s shoulder. Mike knew he must have seen worse, heard more embarrassing discussions. Nonetheless Mike whispered, “Do you really want to have this conversation here?”

An imported hatchback rolled by, the driver invisible behind tinted windows. The car rattled with the locked-down groove of bass and kick drum, some aggressively loud song burping out as it made the left turn to circle back toward the terminal. Mary Beth shook her head. “I don’t. I don’t want to have this conversation here, and I’m not sure I want to have it back in Dallas. I leave, I take the quaint item home to my son. You stay here and look for space.”