The first time I ever met Mike was at my job interview for an overpriced burger restaurant tucked away in the back of a shopping center. He breezed out the swinging doors leading to the kitchen and passed me a glance on his way out the door, ignoring my return look. My interviewer tapped my resume on the linoleum topped table and followed my eyes.

“That’s Mike. He owns the place--couple others in the chain too. Comes in now and then.”

“Yeah?” I said. “What’s he like?”

“He’s like a real man’s man you know?”

No, I did not know. But I would discover.

The second time I ever saw Mike I’d been working for a couple weeks. It was busy, absorbing work--bringing food, smiling while customers yelled at you, stealing french fries when the fry cook looked away, all the usual activities of the casual restaurant job. On the particular day of his second visit, the restaurant was completely deserted. Not unusual for a 3 o’clock Tuesday shift. Me and my coworker Sarah were leaning against the fake marble counters, our chores for the restaurant done. The floor gleamed spotless under our feet. The kid’s plastic cups were perfectly arranged in a towering pyramid by the cash register, just behind the restocked beer sunk deep in it’s ice tub. Sarah was telling tales of her past boyfriends. She was hysterical.

Mike announced his presence by throwing the glass front door as wide open as possible. Sarah later guessed he was 6’5”, and honestly, that seemed about right. But he wasn’t just tall--he was big. His broad shoulders almost touched the door’s edges. He had small blue eyes sunk deep in a head like a cinder block, and they darted about constantly.

“Ladies,” He said. Sarah gave me a discrete eye roll, but I, being new, did not catch it’s meaning.

“Hi Mike!” She said.

Mike walked with long, overextended strides. He planted himself in the center of his empty restaurant and turned slowly, taking in the empty tables, the sparkling floor, the windows--which I had done only an hour ago.

“Olivia.”

I jumped a bit at my name. I didn’t think he knew it.

“Olivia--would you wash the chairs for me?”

I looked across the restaurant at the thirty-some modern white chairs placed around the tables.

“All the chairs?” I said--my first words ever to my boss’s boss.

“Yeah.”

Mike walked past me and disappeared into the swinging kitchen doors. I turned to Sarah with wide eyes.

“ALL the damn chairs?”

“Yep,” Sarah laughed. “I always forget to look busy when he walks in!”

The chairs took me two hours. Around the thirty-minute mark, Mike left. I saw him breeze past the front windows in a massive white pickup, holding a massive cigar out the window.

“Oh yeah. A man’s man.” I grumbled to myself, scrubbing the chair, which in my opinion, seemed rather clean.

And so it went. That pickup truck was like a fire alarm--stop, drop, and find something to do! We scrambled for a clean glass to shine, a nonexistent order to type, a beer that needed sudden restocking. But sometimes you didn’t make it, and it was now your task to spray out the dustbins or clean the entire freezer or replace every ice cube in the whole store. Mike quickly became my least favorite person in the store. I dismissed him as unnecessarily macho, always trying to assert his dominance to a population that already accepted it. He seemed so desperate to me, a masculine overachiever, that I wanted to reject him as the boss altogether. But, being new, it was all I could do to simply view him with contempt.

More weeks passed. Summer hit and the store’s traffic increased tenfold. We now had to deal with a swarm of unruly children and their exhausted parents who didn’t care if crumbs got all over the floor as long as little Timmy was occupied for six minutes.

In the heat of one such busy summer afternoon, Mike’s pickup rolled smoothly into the lot. I was occupied enough to avoid scrambling, but Sarah practically lunged for the broom. Mike stepped out of his truck, but didn’t torpedo his way into the restaurant as he normally did. Instead he crossed to the passenger-side door and opened it for a skinny, small-eyed girl about ten years old. He held her hand as they walked into the restaurant and helped her up unto a stool by the counter.

I had cleared off a table and was now laden with shiny metal baskets, stacked in creative angles down my arm to maximize space. Sarah was sweeping non-existent crumbs in the corner. I crossed Mike’s counter. He cleared his throat.

FOUL! I wanted to yell. The unspoken rule was about to be broken. I was occupied. I had the baskets as proof. Proof that I was working and could not be sent to more work. Pure proof.

“Uh, Olivia?”

I shifted the baskets as I turned to emphasise the extreme weight that occupied me.

“What?”

Mike gestured to the girl. She looked up at me with wide, curious eyes. Her ears were already double-pierced.

“This is my daughter Chelsea.”

“Oh.” I said, still tensed for the command. “Hi Chelsea.”

She giggled.

“Olivia,” Mike started. His voice sounded cautious. “Would you make Chelsea a milkshake?”

Aha! There was the command. I should have known. And yet, it did not hit me with the same punch as I was expecting.

“Whenever you get a second.” Mike added.

I was tempted to say no. I had cause. The fact that he’d broken the rules gave me cause. I was holding baskets. I was busy. I did not have time to obey Mike’s commands because I was busy. Ha. Take that. Even thinking of refusal filled me with satisfaction, and yet--

“Sure.” I said. I dropped the baskets in the sink and left fake-sweeping Sarah to wipe the tables down. This milkshake, I reminded myself, is not for Mike.

Mike talked to me as I mixed the oreos and the ice cream, talking with pride about Chelsea and her soccer team, and the fact that she had three sisters and that they were all such accomplished girls. The hints of arrogance still appeared in his words, but here they seemed almost justified. He was proud of his girls. His many, many girls.

I met all his daughters over the course of that job, and they were all lovely, accomplished, and very, very feminine women. I made them all milkshakes, thinking that with this many women, maybe Mike had to be a man’s man if he was to feel like a man at all. Perhaps it was mere overcompensation with no malice behind it at all.

That doesn’t excuse the chair thing though. That shit sucked.