Chapter 8 #2
Belle Steele was standing two tables back, looking slightly surprised and considerably more at ease than she had at the dinner table the night before, in the way people sometimes look when they're unexpectedly somewhere comfortable.
"Of all the pizza places," Gary said.
She laughed — quick and real, nothing like the careful version she'd deployed around the Sunday table. "Jenkins send you here?"
"First day of class."
"He sends everyone here." She nodded at the chair across from him. "I've got about fifteen minutes before they close. You're leaving?"
He looked at the remaining slice. "I should get back to Marv."
"One more beer. I'll buy." She was already pulling out the chair. "I barely got to talk to you yesterday. Jed was—" She stopped, edited. "It was a lot."
Gary sat back down.
She ordered two beers with the ease of a woman who knew the place well, which turned out to mean she'd been coming here since high school, which turned out to be one of approximately six places in Renton she felt that way about.
"I'm finishing my degree at the women's college of North Texas," she said, when the beers arrived.
"Two more years, if I don't let anything interrupt it again.
" She said again with the specific weight of a woman who knew exactly what had interrupted it and had opinions about it she wasn't entirely ready to voice.
"After that—" She paused, hands around her glass.
"I don't know. Somewhere smaller than the farm and quieter than everything that comes with it. "
"That seems reasonable," Gary said.
Belle looked at him. "You think?"
"I think wanting to live your own life is pretty reasonable, yeah."
She was quiet for a moment. "Pull back the covers at our place and it's—" She stopped again, started over.
"Grandma runs everything, grieves everything, won't let anyone help with either.
Dad works himself into the ground holding the property together, tells everyone he doesn't need anything.
Jed—" The pause this time was longer. "Jed is Jed. "
Gary let the silence sit rather than filling it.
"He left this morning," Belle said. "Back on the circuit. Which is—" She exhaled. "It's fine. It's easier when he's not there, which is a terrible thing to say and also just true." She picked up her beer. "Sorry. You came for pizza."
"I came for pizza," Gary agreed. "I stayed for the company."
She smiled at that — the real version, the one that changed her whole face.
Hank locked up around them without rushing them, which suggested Belle had credit built up here that Gary didn't fully understand yet.
They emerged onto the sidewalk in the early evening, the air still warm but finally starting to consider the possibility of cooling down, the campus quiet around them.
"Do you live far?" Belle asked.
"Few blocks."
"There's that pub around the corner." She tilted her head. "The one on the square side."
Gary thought about the right answer and found it, clearly and immediately. He also found that saying it was harder than locating it.
"I should head back," he said. "Early start tomorrow."
Gary didn’t have an early start, but felt this could be the perfect excuse.
Belle looked at him with the expression of a woman who had been told no before and found it primarily interesting rather than discouraging. She stepped forward, one finger extended, and placed it gently against his mouth before the next version of the sentence could form.
"I won't take no," she said pleasantly.
They went to the pub.
The owner knew Belle the moment she came through the door — knew her the way Renton seemed to know the Steeles generally, which was to say completely and in advance.
He came to the table himself, set down a plate of fried things Gary hadn't asked about but immediately wanted, disappeared briefly into the back.
When he returned he set two glasses on the table, poured from a bottle he placed between them — Steele Bourbon, ten years, the same label as the one in Gary's apartment.
"For the family," the owner said, with a small nod at Belle, and left them to it.
Belle looked at the bottle. Something moved across her face that wasn't entirely uncomplicated. "He does that every time."
"Is that good or bad?"
"Both," she said. "Mostly good." She poured two fingers into each glass, slid one to Gary, and held hers up. "To new friends."
"To new friends."
The bourbon was exactly what Lou had said it was — the ten years visible in every note, something smooth over something serious, the kind of drink that asked you to slow down and Gary found he didn't mind the request.
Belle talked. Gary listened, which was its own form of contribution — she was the kind of person who thought while she was speaking rather than before, and what came out when she had room to do that was more honest than the dinner table version had been allowed to be.
More about Jed — not the story exactly but the shape of it, the way you describe something when you're still inside it.
The money that didn't quite add up to the lifestyle, the calls from numbers she didn't recognize, the pattern of a man who lived one way at home and another way on the road and had apparently stopped working very hard to keep the two versions from overlapping.
"I made one decision without anybody's input, my marriage," she said, at some point in the second glass, quietly. "Just one. And I'm still living inside it."
"The decision or the consequence?" Gary said.
She looked at him. "Is there a difference?"
"Sometimes."
She considered this with the seriousness it apparently deserved. Then she looked at the bottle and back at him. "You're easy to talk to."
"So I've been told."
"Is that a line?"
"It's an observation," Gary said.
She laughed — the real version again, the one he was starting to recognize as the one that meant she'd stopped managing the conversation and was just in it.
The owner came by at some point and left a small wrapped package on the table — a standing arrangement of some kind between Belle and the man who poured Steele Bourbon for the family without being asked.
They left around eight. The air had finally honored its promise, cooled; the square quiet in the specific way of a weeknight in a town that had school in the morning and work before that.
Gary walked her back toward his street — the most sensible direction, he told himself, which happened to be true — and when they reached the corner he stopped.
"This is me," he said.
Belle looked at the building. Looked at him. "I want to see Marv before I go."
Gary recognized this for what it was, also recognized that he'd known since the pub, and possibly since Hanky's, that this was where the evening was heading, that the honest version of events was that he hadn't tried very hard to redirect it.
He opened the door.
Marv was exactly where he'd left him, occupying the center of the living room floor with the sovereign ease of a creature who had been doing exactly this for hours and intended to continue.
He lifted his head at the sound of the door, registered Gary, registered Belle, allowed his tail one slow, conclusive wag before setting his head back down.
"Hi, Marv," Belle said, crouching to put her hands on his ears.
"He approves of you," Gary said.
"He's a very good judge of character."
She straightened up, and turned, and the space between them in the doorway was considerably smaller than it had been a moment ago, though neither of them had moved in any way that was easy to identify.