Chapter 3
Welcome to Renton
Gary dropped Stu off at home around noon, pulled into the driveway of a neat brick ranch on the quieter side of Renton, spent the better part of an hour on the front porch before he even made it inside.
Amber came out first, pulling him into the kind of hug that made it clear she'd been quietly keeping tabs on him from a distance all summer, the way she kept tabs on most things — without announcing it, without making a production of it, just steadily, with complete attention.
She looked well. Tired in the specific way of a woman carrying a second pregnancy through the tail end of summer heat, but well.
Annie came barreling out the front door approximately four seconds after Amber, launched herself at Gary's midsection with zero warning, and demanded to know where Marv was before she'd said anything else. Gary pointed at the Jeep. Annie was already running.
Marv, for his part, accepted the reunion with the dignified restraint of a dog who had been asleep for two days, still a little groggy, which meant he licked Annie's face once, sighed enormously, went back to watching the yard for squirrels.
Gary stayed long enough for coffee and whatever Amber had been baking, which turned out to be something with peaches that he ate two pieces of without being asked.
The conversation moved the way it always did with Stu and Amber together — easy, overlapping, covering three subjects at once without losing track of any of them.
Amber had questions about Rosetown. Stu answered some of them with the careful selectivity of a man who had edited the story considerably.
When Gary noticed the editing, he laughed.
"Sunday dinner," Amber said, before he'd gotten to the door. It wasn't entirely a question.
Gary turned. "Every week?"
"Every week." She folded her arms in the pleasant, immovable way of a woman who had decided this and considered the matter closed. "This Sunday especially. Because I want to hear the version of Rosetown that Stu left out."
Stu, from across the kitchen, did not look up from his coffee.
Gary's first instinct was the familiar one — the low-grade resistance to anything resembling a standing obligation, the sense that a weekly dinner was a weekly check-in, which was a weekly reminder that people were watching to see how he was doing, which implied they had doubts, which he found vaguely irritating even when he understood it was affectionate.
He recognized the instinct for what it was. He let it pass.
"I'll be there," he said.
And he meant it. If nothing else, a Sunday dinner was a fixed point in the week — something to orient around, a reason to be somewhere specific at a specific time.
He'd learned in Rosetown that structure, even the kind that arrived in the form of other people's kitchens, had a way of keeping the worst of his impulses in neutral.
He drove back across town with the windows down, Marv reinstalled across the backseat, nose out the window, ears going flat in the wind. He spent the rest of the afternoon getting the lay of the land.
Campus first.
It was a proper college campus — the kind with old brick buildings set back from tree-lined paths, a quad that was still mostly empty this early in the semester, and the particular smell of cut grass and approaching autumn that seemed to exist on every campus in America regardless of geography.
Gary walked it slowly, Marv drawing looks from the handful of students who were already around, most of whom stopped to ask what breed he was.
Gary answered the same question seven times with the same answer, the same result: people wanted to pet Marv, which he accepted as his due.
He found his building — the graduate assistant housing, two stories of weathered brick on the eastern edge of campus, one parking spot assigned, a ground-floor unit that opened onto a small patch of grass that would suit Marv considerably better than stairs.
The room itself was modest, clean, smelling faintly of the previous occupant's coffee habit, which Gary took as a good sign.
He dropped his bag, confirmed that the bed was functional, the shower had reasonable water pressure, moved on.
The gym next. He found it without much difficulty near the athletic complex — larger than the one at Franklin College in Rosetown, newer equipment, the kind of institutional cleanliness that suggested a recent renovation.
He made a mental note of the hours, confirmed they were reasonable, and felt the particular satisfaction of a man who had located one of the two or three things he needed to feel oriented in a new place.
Then he drove downtown, following Stu's description from the road trip.
Renton's two halves were exactly as advertised.
The college side came first — a strip that had clearly organized itself entirely around the tastes and schedules of students, dense with bars and honky-tonks whose signs promised specials on buckets of beer, whose parking lots were already filling up on a Friday evening.
Quick bites, late hours, the kind of places that were excellent at one or two specific things and didn't pretend otherwise.
It had the reliable energy of a college strip on a Friday — loud, uncomplicated, not particularly interested in subtlety.
Gary drove through it and kept going.
A mile down the road, the town changed character with the abruptness of a decision somebody had made a long time ago.
The courthouse sat at the center of a proper town square, solid, red-brick, permanent-looking, the kind of building that had been the center of gravity for everything around it for a hundred years.
Around the square, arranged with the unhurried confidence of businesses that had been there long enough to stop worrying about it, were the things Stu had described — ice cream shop, local burger spot, a steakhouse with a hand-painted sign that didn't need to advertise because everyone already knew it was there.
Smaller shops. A hardware store. A flower stand outside a building that might have been a pharmacy.
At the corner of the square, set back slightly from the street with a weathered sign above the door that had once been green, now somewhere between green and grey, was a pub.
The Renton Fighting Irish. A single dart board visible through the window.
Two tables on a narrow sidewalk out front.
The kind of place that didn't have a cocktail menu, was proud of it.
Gary parked the Jeep and sat looking at it for a moment.
Marv, who had been watching the square with the calm authority of a dog conducting an inspection, turned and looked at him.
"Yeah," Gary said. "That's our side of town."
He climbed out, clipped Marv's leash more out of habit than necessity, they walked across the square in the warm Texas evening while the sun dropped behind the courthouse, the first lights came on in the windows around them.
Gary turned the corner onto the main square and had approximately two seconds of warning before it happened.
The screech came first — a collective sound from a group of women gathered outside the entrance to the ice cream shop, the kind of noise that sits somewhere between delight and alarm, resolves immediately into the former.
There were six of them, dressed for a night out in the particular way of a group that had pre-gamed sufficiently, reached the point where the evening felt full of possibility.
Marv, who had been conducting his usual systematic investigation of the sidewalk, looked up at the sound with the calm dignity of a creature long accustomed to this reaction.
"Oh my God, is that a horse?"
"He is the cutest thing I have ever seen in my life—"
"Can we pet him? Can we absolutely pet him?"
Gary smiled. "Go ahead."
What followed was approximately three minutes of complete and unanimous focus on Marv, who accepted the attention with the serene composure of a pope receiving pilgrims. Six pairs of hands descended on his ears, his back, his massive head.
He allowed all of it without moving, eyes half-closed, the faint suggestion of a smile around his jowls.
Gary stood back and let it happen, which was always the right move.
"He is unbelievable," said the woman next to him, materializing from the edge of the group with a gin and tonic, the easy posture of a woman who had been laughing for several hours already, intended to continue.
She was tall — genuinely tall, close to six feet — with blonde hair pulled back loosely, brown eyes that registered Gary with the direct, unhurried assessment of a woman deciding what to make of him.
"He knows," Gary said.
"What's his name?"
"Marv."
She laughed. "Of course it is." She extended the hand that wasn't holding the gin and tonic. "Sue."
"Gary."
"You're not from here."
"That obvious?"
"You have the look of a person trying to figure out where they are," she said, without particular judgment.
"I grew up here. I can tell." She nodded toward the group, who were now taking photographs with Marv at his own patient insistence.
"We're celebrating. That's Sarah — it's her divorce party.
She's been through it with her ex, and we decided tonight was the night to put the whole thing behind her officially. "
Gary looked over at the woman in question — dark hair, bright dress, currently crouched down allowing Marv to rest his enormous chin on her shoulder while someone photographed the moment.
She was laughing at something one of the others had said, the specific laugh of a woman who'd spent the last few months not laughing enough, making up for it tonight.
"Good night for it," Gary said.
"The best." Sue turned back to him. "So. What brings you to Renton? Passing through?"
"Other direction, actually. Just arrived this morning. I'm at the college — finishing my master's, working as a grad assistant."