Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“Warren Ashburton. My friends call me Ash.”

“How long have you been married, Ash?”

“As of tomorrow, seven months.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you what I’d tell anyone in your shoes, Ash. Any newlywed. If you’ve thought enough about the future to get married, you’ve already proven that you’re capable of making concrete plans. The smart ones always do. You’re off to a good start, education and everything, but you’ve got to make sure that you have that solid foundation, especially if”—and here Mike lowered his head, looked at Ash by raising his eyes—“the unthinkable happens.”

Then Mike took a hit off his drink, held it in his mouth as if it were bracingly strong, another bit of practiced drama.

The bartender raised his hand before saying to Mike, “Hold that thought. I need to get Sherri over to hear this.” Ash whistled gently and waved over the waitress, a blonde in a red brocade vest and short black skirt. She stopped gathering empty glasses from an abandoned table and, tucking her tray under her arm, headed over to the bar.

The introductions went like this: Sherri told Mike that Utah would be a great place to get settled, start a family, once Ash the bartender passed the bar. “He’s going to work in the city, and I’m going to stay home with the family. Eventually.” Ash looked at his wife, a questioning glance that Mike noticed, but she kept right on. “Well, I am. We’re going to be pretty old-fashioned about things,” she said. “I’m not letting my kids be raised by babysitters and television.”

Ash couldn’t resist chiming in. “That’s because Sherri knows what kind of trouble we used to get into after school. We spent most of high school making out in her parents’ basement. Me, I grew up on television. Smoked a lot of weed watching Bugs Bunny, specifically.”

Sherri laughed. “We were so busy having fun that it took Ash years to muster up the courage to propose.”

“It’s true,” Ash said. “Off and on through college, and then after I got out of school, I waited tables and skied for a few years. Sherri didn’t want to get married until I got serious. Her word.”

Mike smiled. “Tonight is the perfect time to think about this stuff. New year, new plans. You get real long-term benefits from starting a solid financial plan now, when the sacrifices aren’t as noticeable. Being proactive about the future is a pretty sober way of thinking. It shows that you’re serious people.”

Ash tapped on the marble bar top and pointed at Mike’s empty drink, and when Mike nodded for a refill, Ash said, “This one’s on the house.”

Mary Beth thought the conversation looked like a sales conference. The bartender pulled at the front of his red Spencer jacket, then leaned forward to watch Mike scribble on a napkin. Mary Beth knew Mike’s spiel well enough to know that he was drawing a graph on a paper napkin, life expectancies, telling the two prospects some anecdotage. “Financially, it’s women who suffer the most when the unthinkable happens, especially women who do not work,” Mike said, “outside the home.”

“And the sacrifices you have to make are always painful,” Mary Beth added.

“Of course,” Mike answered. He tapped at the place on the napkin where he’d drawn a set of small parallel lines that moved off toward the napkin’s edge. “Your basic lifelines. One for you, Ash, one for Sherri. The only problem is that neither of you knows which line is which, and you can never know for certain which one is going to end first. Most people call what I sell insurance. But I call it assurance . Or, more accurately, reassurance.”

Ash tugged at the cuff of his shirt. “I go first. It’s been decided. After a brief illness. After, say, fifty-two years of marriage.”

Mike took a belt of his drink. “Do you ever play cards, Ash?”

Mary Beth knew Mike was deep into his sales rap here; he could always be counted on to turn the discussion back to odds. He liked to tell his prospective clients—especially the young married couples who took him into their homes and stared expectantly across at him from a couch paid for on revolving credit—how life insurance was like gambling in a casino, except that you went to the table knowing the next turn of the card, the next roll of the dice. No insurance product yet had come to market that was capable of defeating inevitability.

Insurance, in Mike’s eyes, was the only way to beat the house. Sometimes long-shot odds meant you were the only survivor; other times they meant you were almost certain to die. Mike Renfro talked to people about these things, showed them what side of the equation they wanted to be on. Part of his genius as a salesman was that he could talk to anyone about anything. His business depended on it. Early in his career he’d learned by listening how to talk to farmers about sorghum and the latest thresher attachments, knew instinctively who rooted for the Longhorns and who for the Aggies, talked with honest reverence to homemakers about the way his grandmother used to add a touch of real Vermont maple syrup to her oatmeal raisin cookies. But to Mary Beth now, there seemed something plastic and unforgivable about the charade.

Mike pointed again at the two lines on his napkin. Then he drew an X in the middle of the top line. “Who is that going to be, Ash? You? Can you really be sure about that? Four days ago, I gave a widow a check for five hundred thousand dollars because the husband had the good common sense to plan ahead. Forty-two years old, and he dropped dead at his desk. His secretary found him, face down in a chocolate doughnut.”

Sherri the waitress mumbled, “Jesus. Any kids?”

“A boy. Eight,” Mike said. “At least now the kid has a chance. I can’t help but think where that family would be if it weren’t for that check. His mom can pay off the house and still have a little bit of a nest egg. Without that, their situation would be, well, unthinkable.”

Mike merely shook his head when he said the word unthinkable, with enough emphasis that all of them knew he was saying that the unthinkable happens on a regular basis. And none of them could say when it might happen again.

Sherri the waitress leaned back in. “This is a pretty morbid subject for New Year’s Eve. This is supposed to be a night of festivities. Maybe we could plan to get together on Monday.”

Mike rapped twice on the bar’s wooden edge. “Would that it could always be like that. Take your time, get things squared away. After you’ve met all your goals, seen your children get married. That’s the exact problem I’m talking about, Sherri. People always put things off. The hard things, the hard discussions. There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t think they’ll be the exception.”

That’s when Mary Beth said, “But they never are. You never see it, anyway. Never.”

She knew before Mike did that the prospect of a sale here was lost. Mary Beth imagined Sherri and Ash thinking about protracted illnesses, ninety-minute drives for chemotherapy, dialysis, losing a foot to diabetic gangrene, a sudden, shocking death by stroke. Mike was about to fold the tent too, she could tell. What little she knew about sales she had learned from him.

Mike balled up the napkin, used it to polish small circles on the marble bar top. “Sherri’s right. No need to bring the party down. Not tonight.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. It’s as good a time as any to make plans. Tomorrow is the only day I have off between now and spring break,” said Ash. “Otherwise, when are we going to think about this stuff?”

Mike reached for the check, threw down a pair of twenties. Then he pressed another business card onto Sherri’s tray. He said to Ash, “Thinking about this shit comes with being married, or at least it ought to.” Mike turned to Sherri and said, “When you guys are ready for action, you call me. I’ll help you out.”