Chapter 4
Texas Hospitality
Gary woke up early Saturday morning feeling like a man who had driven two days, moved into a new apartment, and attended a divorce party in the same twenty-four-hour window. Which was accurate.
The exhaustion was thorough, specific; he acknowledged it briefly before swinging his feet over the edge of the bed and deciding to ignore it.
One thing was immediately clear: somewhere in the unpacking chaos of the previous day, he had located his coffee maker, with the foresight of a man who knew himself well, set it up, loaded it before going out.
Past Gary had taken care of present Gary. It was the least he could do.
He sat on the edge of the bed while the coffee ran and noticed the bedside table.
Sarah's number, written on a torn corner of something — a receipt, maybe — in handwriting that leaned decisively to the right. A small drawing next to it. A smile, minimalist and unmistakable.
Gary looked at it for a moment. It reminded him, with a pang he didn't entirely examine, of the note Claire had slipped into his pocket outside Moe's back in Rosetown — the same self-possessed confidence in the gesture, the same sense of a woman leaving something behind on her own terms rather than waiting to be asked.
He pocketed the number, poured his coffee, drank it standing at the kitchen window while Marv watched him with the focused attention of a creature who had needs, had concluded that making eye contact was the most efficient way to communicate them.
"Give me ten minutes," Gary said.
Marv sat down. He did not look convinced.
? ? ?
He got Marv out, got himself dressed, made the walk to the gym — short enough that he'd be doing it daily without thinking about it, which was exactly the kind of friction-free routine he needed in a new place.
The facility was good. Better than good.
He moved through a solid hour without pushing too hard — the kind of workout that's less about accomplishment, more about reminding your body that it still functions, which after the previous night felt like the appropriate ambition.
He was coming back out through the main doors, water bottle in hand, squinting against the morning sun, when he heard it.
Country music. The kind with a tempo designed specifically for footwork, bright, propulsive, pouring out of somewhere he couldn't see. Beneath it, rhythmic, collective, oddly compelling — stomping. A lot of stomping. Coming from around the side of the building.
Gary stood on the sidewalk for a moment, reasonably certain this was not a gym-related activity, and followed the sound anyway.
The source was a wide covered patio along the east side of the athletic complex — the kind of outdoor space that existed on every campus, usually held a few damp folding chairs and a decommissioned vending machine.
This morning it held approximately a dozen women who appeared to be in their seventies, arranged in two lines facing the same direction, moving in perfect coordinated unison through a sequence of steps that was considerably more technical than it looked from the outside.
Line dancing. An actual line dancing class, in full operation at eight-thirty on a Saturday morning, while Gary had apparently been thirty feet away on the elliptical.
He stopped at the edge of the patio and watched for a moment with the genuine admiration of a man who has just discovered that other people have entire lives he knows nothing about.
Then a voice cut through the music.
"Gary."
He turned. Sue was at the far end of the second line, in workout clothes, not missing a step, pointing at him with the calm authority of a woman who had been expecting him to materialize eventually and was not surprised it had taken this long.
He walked over.
Sue stepped out of the line smoothly as the song hit a natural break, and the class kept going around her. Up close she looked like a person who had slept considerably better than he had, which he found vaguely unfair.
"You survived the night," she said.
"More or less."
"Sarah got home okay — she texted. You made an impression." She said it without editorial, which was somehow more eloquent than the alternative. "I didn't know you'd be up this early."
"I didn't either." He nodded toward the class. "Is this a regular thing?"
"Every Saturday. Eight-thirty to nine-thirty. These ladies have been doing it longer than I've been teaching it." She looked at him with a particular expression. "You're from the Midwest, right? Gary from the Midwest. Did you ever line dance?"
He thought about it. He was back in a middle school gymnasium — mandatory PE unit, everyone equally mortified, the gym teacher working through steps with the cheerful determination of a person who believed this would build character. It had built something, anyway.
"Once or twice," he said.
"Close enough." Sue stepped back and gestured at the open space beside her in the line. "Get in here."
He opened his mouth.
"I'm not asking," she said pleasantly.
Gary stepped into the line.
? ? ?
What his body remembered and what his feet could immediately execute turned out to be two different things, which was not surprising, provided entertainment for approximately the first ten minutes.
Sue called out the steps beside him — patient, specific, occasionally grabbing his shoulders to redirect him when muscle memory tried to take him somewhere the choreography didn't want him to go.
"Basic step. Heel, toe, heel. Now grapevine right. Right, left behind, right, tap." She demonstrated without looking at her own feet. "Don't think about it. Let it happen."
"Easy for you to say."
"It's always easier to say than to do. That's why I say it."
Gary laughed, which loosened something, and the loosening helped.
The steps started to land with more consistency — not perfectly, not with the fluid economy of the women around him who'd been doing this for years, but with enough that the shape of it was there.
He added flourishes when he felt confident enough, exaggerated the turns, played to the room in the way he'd always played to rooms; the class began responding to it — commentary from the lines around him, laughter at the stumbles that he made worse on purpose, applause when he strung together a clean sequence.
"First time we've had a man in this class in years," one of the women named Ethel called out from the far end of the line.
"You're ruining our average," said another, which drew a laugh that suggested this was a compliment rather than a complaint.
By the end of the session Gary was flushed, sweating considerably more than he had in the actual gym, genuinely out of breath.
The music wound down; the class broke apart into the easy, post-exertion conversation of a group that had been doing this together long enough to have stopped thinking about it as an activity, started thinking about it as a standing date.
He found himself talking to several of the women at once — the easy small talk of a new person in a room full of people with opinions about the place, which Gary had always been comfortable with.
He asked about Renton, about the college, about the square.
Got opinions on all three, unprompted and detailed.
Accepted the compliments on his dancing with appropriate modesty, which is to say very little modesty.
One woman had been watching him through most of the post-class conversation with an expression he associated with people who were deciding whether to say the thing they were thinking.
She was compact and self-possessed, with white hair cut short and the weathered hands of a woman who'd spent most of her life outdoors.
When the group thinned out around them she stepped forward; Gary got the sense that she'd waited specifically for that.
"You're new," she said. Statement, not question.
"Arrived yesterday."
"Where from?"
"Most recently, East Coast. Before that, a lot of places."
She nodded at this like it confirmed something. "Nancy Steele." She extended her hand. "You should come out to the farm."
Gary shook it. "Gary Ryan. What kind of farm?"
Nancy smiled, and it was the smile of a woman whose family had been keeping a good secret for a long time, had made their peace with occasionally sharing it.
"The family business started in 1932," she said.
"Prohibition. My grandfather figured out that the law was temporary but good whiskey was permanent, so he set up a distillery out on the property and got to work while everyone else was waiting for things to change. "
Gary looked at her. "A bootlegging operation."
"We prefer the term family enterprise," she said, without missing a beat.
"It was a different time. The tunnels they built back then are still there — run under the original farmhouse, out to the old barn, down to the creek.
Nobody's used them for actual transport in ninety years, but we keep them because they're part of the story.
" She paused. "The whiskey is still made the same way.
Same recipe, same process. We've never put it on tap, never opened a tasting room — just bottles, sold direct, the history attached to them.
Steele Whiskey. People know the name around here. "
"And you've been doing this since the thirties."
"Going on a hundred years. Fourth generation.
" Something in her expression settled with the quiet, uncomplicated pride of a woman who doesn't need to convince anyone of anything.
"We do Sunday dinner every week. Family comes together — not just blood, whoever's at the table.
We talk about the week behind and the week ahead.
Good food, better whiskey, conversation that actually means something.
" She tilted her head. "You should come. "
Gary was already thinking about Stu and Amber's — the promise he'd made to Amber, her arms folded, the pleasant immovability of it. He calculated quickly.
"What time?"
"Seven," Nancy said.
He had Stu's at noon, or thereabouts, for whatever meal Amber had planned.
Dinner at seven on a farm outside Renton with a fourth-generation bootlegging family was a different kind of obligation entirely — the kind Gary had always been incapable of walking away from, which Nancy Steele had probably assessed within the first five minutes of watching him dance.
She pulled out a card — actual cardstock, slightly worn at the edges, just a name, a phone number, an address — held it out.
"Bring an appetite," she said. "And an open mind. We have plenty of both out there."
Gary took the card. "I'll see you tomorrow, Nancy."
She nodded once, with the satisfaction of a woman who had never seriously considered the alternative answer, and turned back to collect her things from the folding chair where she'd left her jacket.
Gary looked down at the card.
Steele Whiskey. Est. 1932.
He tucked it into his pocket next to Sarah's number and walked back out into the Renton morning, which was shaping up to be considerably more interesting than he'd budgeted for.