Chapter 11 #2
After line class Saturday, Gary had an option of staying on campus, where the Fighting Irish had a noon home game against a conference rival and Renton was conducting itself accordingly.
Gary had heard the crowd noise from his apartment before nine in the morning, which told him everything he needed to know about the scale of the tailgating operation and his desire to be anywhere near it.
Football in Texas wasn't a sport so much as a civic religion, and Gary respected that from a comfortable distance.
He'd grown up in the Midwest, had attended his share of college games, understood the culture — and also understood that navigating a campus full of liquored-up tailgaters on a day when he was actively trying to keep a low profile was an exercise in unnecessary risk.
Instead he took the long route to the lake with Marv.
Sarah was already on the south trail when they arrived, shoes off, watching the water with the same easy patience as Tuesday.
They walked the shoreline for an hour without any agenda beyond the walking, the conversation finding its own level — relaxed, honest in the way of two people who have already said the important things and are finding out what's left after that.
No funny business, as they'd agreed on Tuesday.
The door stayed open. Neither of them tried to define what it was open to, which was, Gary had come to appreciate, the right way to leave it.
Marv walked the south trail with the unhurried satisfaction of a dog who had no opinions about football and found the lakeside smells considerably more interesting than anything that had been happening on campus.
He stopped at every inlet, investigated the water's edge with the thoroughness of a man conducting an official inspection, and declined to be rushed.
Gary walked beside him and thought about Sunday dinner at Stu and Amber's — the clean, simple pleasure of a kitchen that had no agenda beyond the meal, people who knew him without complication, a table where nothing he was carrying needed to come with him.
He was looking forward to it more than he'd expected to. He headed home and called it an early night.
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The next morning he headed out with Marv for Sunday dinner.
Stu had the grill going when Gary pulled into the driveway, brats and burgers over charcoal, the specific smell of it reaching the Jeep before he'd cut the engine.
Annie came through the front door at the sound of the Jeep with the focused urgency of a five-year-old who had been waiting for Marv specifically and was not interested in any other aspect of the visit until that had been addressed.
Marv went with her willingly, tail going, disappearing around the side of the house toward the yard.
Amber was on the back porch with a glass of water and the settled, slightly tired beauty of a woman four or five months along who had made her peace with the pace of the third trimester still being a distance away and was conserving energy accordingly.
Gary hugged her carefully, said nothing about the pregnancy beyond asking how she was feeling, let the subject go when she pivoted to asking about his week.
He had learned early that this was the correct protocol and he followed it without being asked.
He pulled the bottle of Steele bourbon from the bag when they sat down — the ten-year expression, the hand-applied label, the one Lou had sent him home with on his first Thursday — and set it on the table between him and Stu.
Stu picked it up and read the label with the attention he gave most things that arrived unexpectedly.
He poured two fingers into each glass, tasted his, and looked at Gary over the rim with the expression of a man who had known Gary long enough to understand that a bottle this good generally came with a story attached to it.
"This is good stuff," Stu said. "Please tell me you don't actually know the Steeles."
Gary smiled.
He told a version of the story — the version he'd been editing in his head since Tuesday, the one that included everything worth sharing and carefully omitted everything that would require Stu to do something about it.
He explained Sue and the line dancing connection, which Stu received with the resigned amusement of a man whose own engineering precision made Gary's tendency to collect unlikely social situations both baffling and predictable.
He explained Nancy at the Saturday morning class, how the ladies had taken to him with an enthusiasm that he'd found both flattering and slightly alarming.
He explained that Sue's friend Sarah had become a friend of his, in the vague, unspecific way he described things that were more complicated than he wanted to elaborate on at a family Sunday dinner.
He explained that he'd started helping Lou at the distillery on Thursdays — physical work, good pay, time on a property he found genuinely interesting.
He left out Bill. He left out Brett. He left out Jed's operation, the tunnels, the body from 1927, the district attorney, the bar owners with specific connections and low tolerance for supply chain irregularities.
He also left out Belle entirely.
Stu listened to the edited version with the careful attention of a man running a parallel assessment underneath the surface conversation. When Gary finished, Stu turned his glass slowly on the table.
"Keep your distance from them," he said. Not loud, not dramatic. Just certain. "The Steele family has been mixed up in something or other for as long as I've been in Renton. Good people, mostly. But trouble finds them."
"I'm just helping move barrels on Thursdays," Gary said.
"That's what you said about the crab boat in Rosetown," Stu said. "And then six months later you were leaving town ahead of a fire captain."
Gary had no clean response to this and offered none.
Stu let it go. They finished the bourbon and the burgers, the conversation moved on; by the time Gary loaded Marv back into the Jeep and pulled out of the driveway he felt the particular lightness that Sunday dinner at Stu and Amber's reliably produced — the comfort of being known by people who chose to be around him anyway, which was rarer than it looked and worth more than he usually said.
He drove home knowing what he'd known before he went. But at least he wasn't carrying it entirely alone anymore, even if the version of it Stu was carrying was considerably lighter than the real one.
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