Steve Kistulentz: Panorama

That was the quintessential Mike Renfro. Always on the debit. That was what the insurance guys called it, trying to make the sale. An old-fashioned term, but then again, he was kind of an old-fashioned guy. He drove nondescript American cars, the leather seats the only nod to luxury. His latest Cadillac had nearly two hundred thousand highway miles on it from client trips all over north and east Texas. He had a routine and a cocktail of choice and a favorite restaurant where he always ordered the same meal, a New York strip, medium rare, and a baked potato crusted in sea salt and slathered in both butter and sour cream. She liked to tease him that vegetables were not poisonous. Yet he never took a sick day and rarely managed a vacation. He walked in the office each morning at 7:30, wore conservative dark suits and a white shirt, his ties always one of those French patterns with repetitive rows of small fish, birds, or turtles. He was the kind of guy who, although he did not know it, wanted to be a husband, a father. He wanted someone he loved to remind him where he’d left his briefcase and car keys, to brush off the shoulders of his suit jacket as he headed out the door each morning, and at the office, he needed someone to remind him about his lunch meetings and quarterly payroll-tax deadlines. He was in obvious need of two wives, one at the office and one at home, and here she was in the vague land of being a candidate for both.

She pressed the Delete button, then thought of checking on her son one last time. Ten times in three days, Mary Beth had called to remind Sarah that she was as close as the telephone. Gabriel wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but his one-word answers and the pattern of his breathing as amplified by the telephone made the separation tolerable. She thought of a cartoon from her own childhood, Winnie the Pooh offering his nubbly paw to Christopher Robin, the two of them holding hands. New Year’s Eve should have been a family night and was no time to be doing business. She certainly didn’t need Mike asking for his briefcase, a reminder that, above all other things, Mike was still her boss.

There were sentences she could say to Mike, her boyfriend, that she could never speak to Mike Renfro of the Mike Renfro Agency. She knew the opposite to be true as well, and that only fueled her doubt; everything she knew about business and men both told her that dating her boss was a bad idea. She still remembered a story that her father, who had been dead for more than twenty years, had once told. Her father’s college roommate, this guy they called the Maverick, worked as a vice president for a Fortune 500 behemoth that manufactured industrial lubricants. At a hotel along the San Antonio River Walk, the Maverick, emboldened by a quartet of strong Manhattans, made certain mistakes with his assistant. If it was a parable, it was about consequences: the necessary investigations, the divorce, the children testifying in open court as to which parent they preferred, the dissolution of community property, the recriminations. Amid all that destruction Mary Beth remembered only the blunt advice of her father, the career political hack: Don’t shit where you eat.

Still, Mike had more than his status as her boss to recommend him: there was his attentiveness and his work ethic, his luxuriously abundant hair, the way he kept focus on the details both big and small. His briefcase was like an emergency kit on how to be a grown-up, filled with work papers and tiny bottles of hand sanitizer, wet wipes, a travel-size toothbrush. He was prepared for every eventuality. He himself was covered with $2 million in term life insurance, a line he’d mention in his sales calls, but on this New Year’s Eve, Mary Beth realized that he’d never mentioned who the beneficiary might be. She suspected an ex-wife out there, somewhere nebulous, one day to be surprised by a sudden windfall. There were always these warning signs, but then, there were always enough positives to overlook the questionable things she already knew, a pair of acrimonious divorces (at sales conferences, he liked to joke that his next wife should be named Plaintiff, just to save the time), the house bereft of furniture save for giant televisions and leather sofas, a refrigerator filled only with beer, mixers, and condiments, the appearance and disappearance of twentysomething women who worked for six months, tops, as Mike Renfro’s “personal assistant.”

Calling him a boyfriend made what she was doing here feel illicit and ill advised. Nor was he on some inevitable path to becoming her fiancé. Calling Mike her date was inadequate; he was one of the few constants in her life since the morning eight years ago when she answered a Dallas Morning News advertisement for an entry-level sales position and found herself being talked into taking the job as his office manager.

In the few awkward months when she referred to Mike as just a good friend, he’d courted her intermittently with small gifts, trinkets from his every business trip. Any weekend he spent at his condo near Galveston, Mike always returned with boxes of saltwater taffy. Mary Beth mentioned once that she preferred the peppermint-flavored pieces, white with red stripes, like some hybrid toothpaste. After his next trip, Mike put a box in the reception area and another at the front desk for the rest of the women, but not before liberating all the peppermint pieces, spiriting them into a sandwich bag that he left on Mary Beth’s desk. She told him, “The taffy was great. But next time I want fudge, two boxes. One for here and one for home,” and he had remembered that too, showing up a month later with a pound each of light- and dark-chocolate fudge and a bonus pound of peanut butter. They opened all three boxes and mixed the pieces together so that Mary Beth could take home a little of each. Between the two of them, they ate nearly a pound, leaving Mary Beth with a sugar- and salt-loaded tongue that could not be satisfied even after three glasses of water.

Then, somehow, they were dating. Now her presence in Salt Lake City made her feel as if she had not been courted but defeated, her resistance poked through by his persistence and ardor. She liked the physical pleasure of being around Mike too, both the lovemaking and, more recently, the reassuring way his solid frame dominated her bed. She liked the feel of a man next to her, especially now that Gabriel was no longer a toddler appearing in her doorframe in the night, seeking the solace of his mother and her queen-size bed. Just once Mary Beth wished Mike would stay for breakfast, for all the rituals of a family, but what Gabriel might make of that she did not know. Her son had no idea what to call him either. Mike insisted on being called Mike, whether he was talking to a six-year-old or to a client, but whenever Mike arrived to watch a movie or take Mary Beth and Gabriel out to dinner, the kid still referred to him as Mr. Mike.

She decided that New Year’s Eve was exactly the time to put labels on things; they could stay up all night if they had to without worrying about waking up the kid in the next room. They had become a regular thing, but usually just on Thursday and Saturday evenings. Their interactions occurred almost exclusively on neutral turf; the only times she’d been to his house fell under the pretense of her professional duties, and that meant she had a hard time picturing her son roaming the bland suburban expanses of Mike’s house. In Mike’s list of personal and professional obligations, she had no idea where she fell. She knew too his upcoming calendar, and there wasn’t much room in there for her, for Gabriel. She wasn’t even sure how much she would see of him in January, given Mike’s other plans: a trip to his mother’s (the first in twenty-one months), a sales conference in Houston, a Hawaiian vacation (apparently, he hadn’t thought of inviting her).