Chapter 2
Roadtrip
The drive from Rosetown to Renton took two days, which was either a long time or not nearly long enough depending on what you were leaving behind, what you were heading toward.
Gary hadn't entirely decided which category this trip fell into, so he kept his eyes on the road and let the miles do their work.
Marv occupied the entire backseat of the Jeep Wrangler with the absolute authority of a creature who had never once considered that the space might belong to anyone else.
At a hundred and eighty-five pounds, he didn't so much sit in the backseat as install himself in it — legs sprawled in four different directions, head propped against the window at an angle that looked deeply uncomfortable but apparently wasn't, jowls leaving slow, deliberate prints on the glass every time the Jeep hit a curve.
Within twenty minutes of leaving Rosetown, he was asleep.
Within thirty, he was dreaming — paws twitching, ears flattening and rising, the occasional muffled bark escaping without warning, making Stu flinch every single time regardless of how many times it happened.
"He's chasing something," Gary said.
"He's always chasing something," Stu said. "What does he actually chase in real life? Because I've never seen him move faster than a slow walk."
"Squirrels, mostly. He never catches them. I don't think he's trying to."
"So the dream version of him is significantly more ambitious."
"Apparently."
Luckily for everyone involved, the Jeep's air conditioning — a minor miracle given the vehicle's age and general mechanical disposition — held for the entirety of both days.
Gary had privately given it about a fifty-fifty chance somewhere around the Virginia border, but it ran clean and cold the whole way down through the Carolinas into the deep heat of the South, keeping the cab at a temperature that made Marv's sprawled, window-fogging presence tolerable rather than catastrophic.
Before leaving Rosetown, Carl, a coffee shop owner and close friend, had packed them off with enough scrapple, an east coast pork mix delicacy, to last the trip — several generous portions wrapped carefully in wax paper, tucked into a small cooler with the solemn efficiency of a man who understood that this was a serious matter.
Carl had taken to Marv the way Rosetown generally had: immediately, completely.
The farewell had been a more protracted affair between Carl and the dog than between Carl and Gary, which Gary felt was about right.
Stu, watching this from the passenger seat somewhere outside Charlotte, shook his head. "You know they don't have scrapple in Texas."
Gary glanced in the rearview mirror at Marv, who had his nose buried in the cooler. "He's going to be devastated."
"I might have a solution." Stu shifted in his seat with the barely-contained energy of a man about to reveal something he'd been sitting on. "There's a place near campus. Family-run, been there forever. They do kolaches."
Gary looked over. "The pastry?"
"Czech pastry. Filled with sausage, or cheese, or fruit, but mostly sausage around here. Locals treat them approximately the way Marv treats scrapple." He paused. "I have a connection."
Gary considered this. "You have a kolache connection."
"I have a kolache connection."
In the backseat, Marv let out a muffled bark in his sleep and went still again. The cooler nudged his nose. He didn't wake up.
The conversation between Gary and Stu moved the way it always did on long drives — loosely, without agenda, following whatever thread presented itself, dropping it just as easily when the next one arrived.
They talked about Rosetown the way you talk about a place once you're far enough away from it to see it clearly: the Sock Burning Festival, the oyster shooters at Moe's, the farmers market on Saturday mornings, Carl's coffee, the look on Moe's face the night Gary had walked back downstairs before the mayor's speech.
They talked about T, the crab pots, the Chesapeake sunrises.
They talked about Stu's summer visit — the renovation projects, the Naked Mile, the Amber pregnancy reveal that Gary had accidentally triggered with a hammer and his own thumb.
"That was a good summer," Stu said, somewhere around the Georgia state line, in the tone of a man wrapping something up.
"It was a good summer," Gary agreed.
Neither of them said anything for a while after that.
The road stretched out ahead, flat and wide, lined with pine trees that got denser and taller the further south they went.
Marv snored. The Jeep's air conditioning hummed.
The miles between Rosetown and whatever came next accumulated in the rearview mirror without ceremony.
Eventually Stu stretched his arms above his head and said, with the careful casualness of a man working up to something, "You know this is going to be different."
"Texas?"
"The degree. The whole thing. You're actually finishing it this time."
Gary didn't answer right away. "I know."
"That's not an insult."
"I know that too."
Stu nodded, apparently satisfied. He pulled out his phone, scrolled for a moment, put a song on — something neither of them bothered to name, which was how they'd always listened to music on long drives.
In the backseat, Marv made a small sound in the back of his throat, dreaming his ambitious dreams about squirrels he'd never catch, full of scrapple, entirely unbothered by the distance between where he'd been and where he was going.
Gary figured that was probably the right approach.
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They pulled into Renton on a Friday morning, which was either good planning or good luck — Gary had learned not to be too particular about which one it was.
His graduate assistant appointment didn't officially begin until the third Monday in October, which meant the weekend stretched out ahead of him like a gift nobody had told him was coming.
Two days. No obligations, no syllabi, no classrooms, no introductions to make. Just the Jeep, Marv, and the particular quiet of a town that didn't know him yet.
He intended to use them well.
The academic setup was Stu's doing, arranged with the methodical efficiency of a man who approached favors the same way he approached engineering problems — identify the goal, map the constraints, find the most direct path through.
Gary was closer to the finish line than most people in his situation realized.
Fifteen credits stood between him, the degree he'd started, set aside, circled back to, set aside again over the better part of a decade — a number that had once felt theoretical; now, in the light of an actual enrollment confirmation email, it felt almost manageable.
Six credits in the fall. Two classes, running alongside fifteen to twenty hours a week of graduate assistant work that would cover his housing. Then nine credits in the spring — three classes, a harder push, but a straight line to the end. One academic year. Done.
Stu had arranged an accelerated track, called in whatever he needed to call in, presented the whole thing to Gary with the quiet satisfaction of a man who'd solved a problem he'd been thinking about for longer than he'd admitted.
Gary had accepted it with the particular gratitude of a person who understood that this kind of help didn't ask for anything back except that you didn't waste it.
The housing situation had resolved itself cleanly, at least. Graduate assistants received campus accommodation as part of the arrangement; Gary's building — a low, brick two-story affair near the edge of campus that had seen better decades — had confirmed, after a brief exchange of emails, that large dogs were permitted.
Gary had not specified how large. He'd decided that was a conversation best had in person, once people had met Marv, had a chance to form an attachment before the paperwork made any of it complicated.
Living with Stu, briefly considered and quickly abandoned, had never been a serious option.
"One kid at home," Stu had said, somewhere around the Tennessee border, with the measured tone of a man stating facts rather than making excuses. "One on the way. And whatever you're imagining when you picture Marv sharing a house with all of that—"
"I'm not imagining anything," Gary said.
"Good."
"Amber made the call?"
Stu didn't answer immediately. "We both made the call."
Gary looked in the rearview mirror at Marv, who was upside down across the backseat with his paws in the air, snoring at a volume that had been a consistent presence for roughly six hundred miles.
"You'd have lasted a week," Gary said.
"Four days," Stu said. "I was being generous."
In the backseat, Marv kicked in his sleep, clipped the door panel with one enormous paw, and snored through the impact without stirring. Stu watched this with the expression of a man who had made the correct decision, feeling peaceful about it.
They drove on. The Texas skyline opened up around them — wide, flat, enormous in the particular way of places that don't apologize for their scale — Gary found himself doing the thing he always did when arriving somewhere new, which was try to take it in all at once, end up with almost none of it.
Just an impression. Big sky. Warm light.
The smell of something different coming through the vents.
Renton on a Friday morning was quiet in the way college towns are quiet the week before everything starts — a held-breath quality, students not yet arrived in full, the campus buildings sitting in the early sun with that specific look of places about to become very busy.
Gary had lived in enough college towns to recognize it.
The GPS directed them off the highway and onto a tree-lined road that curved toward the eastern edge of campus, where Gary's building sat back from the sidewalk behind a parking lot that still had most of its spaces.
He pulled in, cut the engine, and sat for a moment.
Stu looked over at him. "How are you feeling?"
Gary thought about it honestly. Outside, a squirrel crossed the parking lot at a diagonal, disappeared under a hedge, and was gone.
In the backseat, Marv's head came up from dead sleep with sudden, electric attention — eyes locked on the spot where the squirrel had been, ears forward, every inch of him awake for the first time in two days.
Then the squirrel didn't reappear, and Marv's head sank back down with a long, deflating sigh.
"Yeah," Gary said. "That's about right."
He opened the door, climbed out. Renton, Texas received him the way all new places did — without ceremony, without opinion, entirely indifferent to what he'd left behind.
Which was, he'd found, the best possible way to start.
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