Chapter 5
Sunday Dinner
Gary stood on the sidewalk outside the athletic complex and took stock of his situation.
He had been in Renton, Texas for less than twenty-four hours.
In that time he had moved into a new apartment, attended a stranger's divorce party, given a body shot off a bar, watched a woman he'd just met ride a mechanical bull, walked a college campus in the dark with someone else's ex-wife, and spent his first morning line dancing with a group of women old enough to be his mother before being invited to a bootlegger's Sunday dinner by a woman named Nancy Steele.
Classes started Monday. Graduate assistant orientation started Monday. He had two Sunday dinners to attend tomorrow, on opposite sides of town, a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound dog to get accustomed to the Texas heat.
Gary looked at Marv.
"Let's see what this day brings buddy," Gary said.
? ? ?
He showered, changed, filled Marv's bowl, drank the last of the morning's coffee standing at the kitchen counter, and tried to remember what day it felt like. It felt like approximately four days compressed into one.
Stu had mentioned a local place. The name surfaced from somewhere in the two-day road trip conversation — Café Texas, near the edge of the college strip, family-run, the kolache connection Stu had teased about somewhere around the Georgia state line with the quiet pride of a man who'd been holding this information back as a gift.
Gary clipped Marv's leash and they walked.
Café Texas occupied a corner spot a few blocks from campus with the settled, sun-warmed look of a place that had been doing exactly this for a long time and had made its peace with not needing to be anything else.
Hand-lettered sign above the door. A small outdoor section with two metal tables already occupied by people with coffee and newspapers — the specific Saturday morning demographic of people who had nowhere urgent to be and were enjoying the fact.
The smell reached the sidewalk first — coffee, something baked, something with sausage underneath it, warm and immediate.
Marv stopped walking and lifted his nose.
Gary opened the door.
The inside was narrow, warm, thoroughly occupied, the kind of place that fits more people than the square footage should allow because everyone in it has been coming long enough to know exactly where to stand.
Behind the counter, moving between the espresso machine and a display case that ran the length of the room, was a man Gary placed in his mid-forties — broad-shouldered, easy-moving, with the unhurried efficiency of a man who had worked this counter long enough that the work had become muscle memory rather than effort.
The man looked up. His eyes went from Gary to Marv and stayed there for half a second with the particular widening that Gary had come to recognize as the standard first response to Marv's scale.
Then he looked back at Gary with the expression of a man assembling information.
"You're Gary," he said.
"Apparently."
"Bryan." He extended a hand across the counter. "I've known Stu since his first year here. Which means I know more about you than you've probably been led to believe." A pause, the smile of a man enjoying this. "The fountain story. The streaking incident. He's got a mouth on him for an engineer."
Gary laughed despite himself. "It's a gift."
"He mentioned you were coming. Mentioned Marv.
" Bryan leaned over the counter to get a proper look at the dog, who was sitting with impeccable posture, nose trained on the display case with the focused concentration of a sommelier at work.
"I didn't fully picture this." He straightened up.
"Good to meet you both. What are you having? "
Gary ordered coffee and gestured toward the kolaches in the case. Bryan produced two — sausage, the traditional kind, wrapped in something that smelled like it had been baked about forty-five minutes ago — along with a third that he set on a small piece of wax paper on the counter.
"That one's for him," Bryan said, nodding at Marv. "On the house. Welcome to Renton."
Marv accepted the kolache with the same dignified care he'd brought to Carl's scrapple in Rosetown, somehow making the consumption of a sausage pastry look ceremonial. Bryan watched this with visible satisfaction.
"He can come back anytime," Bryan said.
"He's going to remember you said that."
"Good." Bryan slid the coffee across the counter. "Tell Stu I said hello. And tell him his stories are better when he's not the one telling them."
Gary took his coffee and his kolaches and walked back out into the Saturday morning with Marv threading alongside him, content, unhurried, already at home in a town he'd known for less than a day.
? ? ?
The afternoon was quiet in the way first days in new places tend to be — full of small tasks that don't individually amount to much but collectively add up to something that feels like settling in.
Gary unpacked what remained in the duffel, found places for things, made a run to a grocery store three blocks from campus, restocked the basics.
He walked Marv through the neighborhood in a widening loop, letting the dog investigate everything at his own pace, which was thorough, unhurried, took considerably longer than a simple walk had any business taking.
By early evening the apartment felt less like someone else's space and more like a place he could live in for a while, which was about as much as he needed from it right now.
He had been debating the evening when his phone buzzed. Sarah.
Just wanted to make sure you found your way back okay. Also Marv deserves a formal apology for being abandoned.
Gary smiled and typed back. He forgave you immediately. He's easy like that.
How are you settling in?
Starting to feel like a place, he wrote. You free tonight?
A pause. Then: I have to do something for a couple hours. But after?
He suggested the Fighting Irish, the pub on the courthouse square that had caught his eye the night before. She knew it, she said. She'd meet him at nine.
Gary fed Marv, changed into something that wasn't workout clothes, walked across town in the cooling Texas evening with his hands in his pockets and the particular low-grade good feeling of a man who has had a disorienting couple of days and is starting to find the edges of the place.
The Fighting Irish was exactly what it had looked like from the outside — comfortable and unpretentious, smelling of old wood and draft beer, a dartboard on the far wall, a bar that wrapped the corner and gave everyone a clean sightline to the room.
The bartender was a heavyset man named Pete who pulled Gary's beer without being asked what he wanted, which Gary took as a sign of correct instincts.
He sat at the bar, drank slowly, watched the room fill in around him.
Saturday night on the courthouse square had a different texture than the college strip — older, easier, people who knew each other's names and didn't need to perform anything.
A couple of tables were deep in what looked like a long-running card game.
Someone had put something on the jukebox that leaned toward Americana rather than pure country.
Two women near the window were sharing a bottle of wine, talking the way old friends talk when they finally have time.
Sarah arrived at nine-fifteen, slightly out of breath, and climbed onto the stool beside him.
"Sorry. Ran long."
"You're here," Gary said. "What are you drinking?"
They stayed for three hours. The conversation was easy in the way that second conversations sometimes are when the first one did enough work to skip the formalities — they moved through the surface material quickly, got to the things underneath it, the way you do with someone you've already been honest with, even briefly.
She talked about Renton, about going to school here, leaving, coming back, about the marriage, the end of it, what came after with the matter-of-fact candor of a woman who had processed it enough to talk about it without performing either devastation or recovery.
Gary listened, asked the right questions, offered just enough of his own equivalent stories to keep it balanced.
At some point Pete put last call glasses in front of them without being asked.
"How are you feeling about Monday?" Sarah asked.
Gary considered it honestly. "Ready. I think."
"You'll be fine," she said, in a tone that wasn't reassurance so much as simple assessment. She picked up her glass. "Renton's a good place to start something."
Gary touched his glass to hers.
They walked back to his apartment through the quiet of the square at midnight, Marv's excited greeting at the door providing the only drama of the evening.
Sarah stayed long enough for one more drink from the bottle of red wine Gary had picked up at the grocery store, and then she kissed him at the door with the warm, uncomplicated ease of a woman who had decided this was what it was — good company, good timing, nothing more complicated than that.
"Go to sleep," she said. "You have a big week."
He locked the door, finished his glass, and was asleep before midnight for the first time in longer than he could remember.
? ? ?
Stu's house the next day had the particular warmth of a Sunday that hadn't decided whether it was lunch or dinner, the kitchen smelling of both at once.
Amber had committed something to a dutch oven several hours earlier and the results were evident from the front porch.
Annie claimed Marv the moment they came through the door, leading him to her designated corner of the living room with the authority of a five-year-old who had made this territorial decision in advance.
Marv followed with the long-suffering goodwill of a dog who understood that some humans simply required more supervision than others.
They ate. The conversation moved the way it always did in Stu and Amber's kitchen — warm, overlapping, covering the week ahead, Annie's extensive, already-formed opinions about kindergarten, the logistics of Amber's second trimester, Stu's workload, the general managed chaos of a household bracing for expansion.
Gary talked about his classes, the grad assistant setup, the campus, the gym. He talked about Bryan at Café Texas and watched Stu's face do the thing it did when a plan had worked exactly as intended.
"I told you," Stu said.
"You did."
"The kolaches."
"Marv approves."
"That's the metric that matters."
After the plates were cleared and Amber was convincing Annie that quiet time was a concept worth investing in, Stu appeared at Gary's elbow in the kitchen with the specific energy of a man who had been waiting for the right moment.
He leaned against the counter. Folded his arms. "I got a text from Sue yesterday."
Gary continued rinsing his plate.
"Interesting text," Stu continued.
"She seems nice."
"Gary."
Gary set the plate in the drying rack and turned around. Stu was looking at him with the expression of a man who had known Gary for twenty years, was capable of reading the available information, arriving at an accurate conclusion without requiring additional detail.
"You've been here barely two days," Stu said.
Gary shrugged, which was not a denial and they both knew it.
Stu looked at the ceiling briefly with the quiet resignation of a man adjusting his expectations in real time. "You know what, I don't want to know. I genuinely do not want to know." He looked back down. "Are you okay?"
"Better than I've been in a while, actually."
Stu held the look for another second — checking whether the answer was the real answer or the version being offered for convenience — apparently found what he needed. He unfolded his arms, reached past Gary for a dish towel. "Fine. But you're going to tell me eventually."
"Probably," Gary agreed.
Amber appeared in the kitchen doorway with the timing of a woman who had heard enough from the hallway. She looked between them with the expression she reserved for situations that had already resolved themselves without her intervention.
"He's staying for coffee," she said.
"He has plans," Gary said. "That I'm not going to explain right now because it'll take too long and I don't want to spoil it."
Amber studied him. "Are they good plans or Gary plans?"
"Both, I think."
She accepted this with the measured patience of a woman who had been married to Stu long enough to know that some things were simply going to happen. "Fine. Next Sunday. And I want details."
Gary hugged her carefully, said goodbye to Annie, shook Stu's hand the full version — the one that meant something — and collected Marv from his corner.
He loaded Marv into the Jeep, pulled out of the driveway, and looked at the card Nancy Steele had given him.
? ? ?
The Steele farm was twenty minutes outside Renton — south on the highway, then east on a county road that narrowed twice before arriving at a gate with a wooden sign. Steele. Est. 1932. Nancy had texted one addition to the directions: Don't be late. The whiskey waits for nobody.
Gary put the Jeep in gear.
Marv had migrated to the passenger seat somewhere during the drive across town, a decision Gary hadn't challenged. He sat upright and alert, watching the road with the interested expression of a creature who had learned that unfamiliar destinations were generally worth investigating.
The campus fell away behind them. The road widened into highway, then narrowed again as Renton's edges gave out to open land — flat at first, then gently rolling, the late afternoon light going gold across fields that stretched to a tree line in the distance.
Texas at this hour looked like something painted slowly and with patience.
Gary found the gate without trouble. The sign was exactly as described — weathered and deliberate, the kind of marker that doesn't need to say much because it's been saying the same thing long enough that everyone in the county already knows it.
He turned onto the drive. Marv's nose went immediately to the window crack at the smells that came with it — grass, wood smoke, and something deeper underneath, the faint trace of a process that had been running on this land for the better part of a century.
The farmhouse appeared through the trees. Lights were on in every window, and even from the end of the drive Gary could hear voices — the layered sound of a large family table already in progress.
He pulled in, cut the engine, and sat for a moment the way he always sat in new places — taking the temperature before stepping into it.
Marv looked at him.
"Alright," Gary said. "Let's go meet the Steeles."