“I remember,” Mary Beth said, pinching the phone between her neck and shoulder and punching out the toll-free number for her airline. “But I’m still going to see if I can’t get on an earlier flight.”
The change of arrangements cost Mary Beth seventy-five dollars, and after she hung up, she told Mike, “My flight’s at noon.”
“Good. Then you have time to come back to bed.”
15
AS SHE moved through the center hallway of Mike Renfro’s home, running her hand along its textured, coffee-colored walls, Sarah Hensley listened for the stirrings of the child. Since he’d been in her care, Gabriel had established a routine, helping himself to a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and stationing himself in front of the den’s battleship-size television. But this morning the television was off. Sarah retraced her steps back to the guest bedrooms, where she found Gabriel sitting up in bed, running a toy ambulance across his covers, over the tops of his legs. He slept on a pull-out leather couch in a room crowded with all the accoutrements of a businessman who occasionally works from home.
Sarah had learned that the best way to deal with him was to ask simple questions, try to have no agenda, so she said, “What are you playing?”
“I’m playing disaster. The ambulance comes to pick up the injured, but there aren’t any, so they get to drive fast back to the fire station.”
“There aren’t any injured?”
“Everybody is dead. Nobody needs an ambulance. That’s what makes it a disaster.”
“What else have you been playing this morning?”
He pointed at Mike’s desk, a mahogany behemoth riddled with cubbyholes for documents, even two brass inserts for inkwells. Across the top of the desk were strewn several feet of paper, old adding-machine tape. Sarah picked one up and looked at the numbers, random seven- and eight-figure sums that did not compute. “I’ve been playing insurance,” Gabriel answered.
No question her charge was a weird kid. An eater of paste, a loner, the kind of kid who carried to school a lunch pail (as opposed to his peers and their neon lunch boxes that pledged allegiance to dolls, superheroes, boy bands, and NFL franchises and came with a matching backpack); he could be counted on to switch to a briefcase in high school. To Sarah, the kid was a type, an only child now and forever permeated with a simultaneous sense of entitlement and a last-to-be-picked-for-dodgeball kind of awkwardness. He talked in complete sentences, forswore slang, did not watch cartoons, and sounded in all ways like he was already consumed with his ratio of good cholesterol to bad, with the demands of paying for whole life insurance, saddled with a thirty-year mortgage, and saving to put his own children through college. Each time Sarah had asked Gabriel what he wanted to do, put in a movie (Mike had provided an impressive stack of Disney fare on DVD) or take a nap or walk to the park, he’d answered her with a weighty sigh, telling her, “That’s kid stuff.”
At his next birthday, in just a few weeks, Gabriel Blumenthal would be seven years old. He had the hair typical of his mother’s side of the family, an ample mop that gently faded from blond to medium brown close to the scalp. Only Mary Beth could see any semblance of Gabriel’s father in the boy. Quiet. Gabriel was lithe, thin. He didn’t have much to say.
Sarah had no idea what to do with him. The entire weekend, Gabriel had shown his usual disdain for the constructs of organized play. He was not interested in Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, video games, anything that required the participants to take turns. He indulged only in the common, solitary escapisms—building elaborate planned communities of Lego and Lincoln Logs, clogging their imaginary commuter arteries with Matchbox cars. Sarah had been warned about this: his mother hoped he might move on to a more constructive hobby in a year or two, say, building model aircraft and miniature versions of the muscle cars of the past, each hand painted with Testors enamels using a fine-point brush.
Then there was the matter of his name, Gabriel. Sarah thought he carried it around as his own private burden, treating it as if it were an adversary. He would not permit his classmates or teachers to call him by a nickname or the more familiar Gabe, and he kept reminding them—and Sarah—that the name belonged to one of the four archangels. She could imagine how well this went over with the other children. Sarah spent the weekend trying to coax him into behaving more like her definition of normal. They talked football. He sampled liberally from a plate of foods he had never tried before, exotic fare like spring rolls and caramel chicken, along with staples of the American childhood, cheese puffs and Oreos and pretzel rods. How in the name of God could a little boy be six and never once have savored a pretzel rod liberally slathered in creamy peanut butter? She’d had to bribe him to do it. She tried to plant a seed, an idea, that he needed to become more like a boy before he could become a man; he needed a dog as his constant companion, a sidekick (like all great heroes), and he needed to be responsible for the dog, teach it to fetch and shake and only to bark at strangers.
Sarah sat on the bed next to him and noticed that the front of his pajama top was crusted with a bib of boogers and snot. And she laughed, because she was thinking how children never call things by their proper names. Booger was itself a word from her childhood, from all childhoods, really, and then eventually Booger was her favorite nickname for her younger brother; she did not know if there was some medical term for what was on the front of Gabriel’s shirt, but she helped him undress. He did not unbutton the top but rather raised both arms to the sky, and Sarah pulled it over his head. “Come on. We need to wash this, and then I’ll make breakfast. Huevos rancheros.”
“What are huevos?” It came out way-views.
“Seriously? You can’t be a Texan without knowing what huevos rancheros are. Eggs, Mexican-style. It’s breakfast.”
“Who says I want to be a Texan?”
Sarah pointed at a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt that hung over the back of the desk chair, and Gabriel obligingly put it on. “You are a Texan. That’s what they call people who were born here.”
The last thing he asked Sarah as they headed to the kitchen for breakfast was, “Was that my mom?”
16
THE WEATHER forecast promised Mary Beth an uneventful flight home. The Utah sun was bright, the air warm and dry, with the occasional gust biting down into the valley. Still, she preferred to travel on overcast days, chilled in the cool whirl of a car air conditioner, a sensual memory of a childhood spent crisscrossing the eastern United States in a wood-paneled Chrysler wagon, fighting her brother for elbow room in the backseat. Now, at the end of her getaway with Mike, she was thinking about this trip in terms of a mistake, an ill-advised decision. She had come to Utah seeking definition, and she’d gotten it, even if it wasn’t the result she’d hoped for. She prayed the fifteen-minute ride to the airport would pass in silence.
Surely all over America, other couples were headed home from romantic excursions, last-minute jaunts famous for room service and the abandon of hotel-room sex, the ability to be someone other than yourself for a few days. But Mary Beth felt as if she was one of the few anxious to get home. She did not resent the urge; stunned as she had been by Gabriel’s sudden arrival, after two years of trying for a child and then two years of trying to extricate herself from a dying marriage, she now better understood the instinctive drives of motherhood: the urge to protect her son, to know where he was at all times, to make sure he ate a balanced diet and watched a minimum of television, and, finally, this New Year’s morning, her sudden unwillingness to consign him to even one more hour under Sarah’s care.
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.
“We’re going to get our picture taken,” she said, a meek offering that started as a fib but now seemed organic, believable.
“What for? I mean, you get a school picture each year, don’t you?”
“That was September.” Mary Beth had forgotten about picture day. She’d shipped Gabriel off to school in a worn but serviceable Spider-Man T-shirt. Among his scrubbed, starched, and ironed classmates, Gabriel stood out, the cowlick at the crown of his hair giving the illusion of another inch of height. Her forgetfulness was a mark against her, a sign of inattentiveness, a warning that she’d been distracted from the important things. The picture took up residence in her office and on her refrigerator at home as if it were proof of her parental inadequacies. “Kids change so fast at this age.”
17
MOST
OF the neighborhood around Capitol Hill stood quiet, the only sound the grinding of the taxi’s ancient brakes, metal against metal, as it slowed through the circles along Massachusetts Avenue. At the turn onto North Capitol Street, Richard spotted the familiar corner window of the Russell Senate Office Building and smiled; on television, the window had belonged to Oscar Goldman, the bureaucrat who kept the Six Million Dollar Man in line. These bits of knowledge made Richard feel proprietary about his city.
The news bureau was squirreled away in a bland office building, a common late-1960s box with a marble facade. Outside, a custodian sat against a concrete planter full of boxwoods and ornamental cabbage, waving a garden hose in front of him, the insistent stream of water pushing cigarette butts, stray leaves, and the foil wrappers from chewing gum off to the curb. He was the only person Richard passed on his way inside.
At the empty receptionist’s desk, Richard ventured a few half-shouted hellos before Toni White came out to greet him. He felt the taut muscles across her upper back as they embraced in an A-framed hug.
“How do I look?” Richard smoothed his lapels, tugged down on his jacket hem.
Toni fingered the lapel of Richard’s jacket, a discriminating shopper examining high-end merchandise. “Top-notch. Like a trusted newsman. Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet,” she said, glancing at her watch.
Toni led him past the newsroom, where desks were pushed together in clumps of four, as in a fourth-grade classroom; sometimes during the workday, correspondents did live fills sitting at their desk. Behind each cluster you could see the dominant curvature of the Capitol’s marble dome through the two windows at the back of the room. Richard thought it was funny that his interview would be conducted in front of a green screen that would be filled with a graphic to make him appear as if he too were just outside the Capitol, when the real one sat across a grove of trees and two streets, less than six hundred yards away.
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