Chapter 13 #3
Annie had been waiting for Marv with the focused anticipation of a child who has been told company is coming and has prepared accordingly — she had arranged his water bowl in the corner of the living room herself, filled it to what she'd determined was the appropriate level, was ready with a treat she'd been holding since four o'clock.
Marv accepted all of this with the grave dignity of a guest who appreciates proper ceremony, Annie spent the next hour on the living room floor conducting the kind of intensive physical examination of a large dog that only five-year-olds and veterinarians attempt.
Thursday morning the house came fully alive before seven.
Amber ran the kitchen with the same organized competence she brought to most things — specific tasks delegated clearly, the overall operation moving according to a plan she'd clearly constructed in advance and was executing without improvisation.
Gary was assigned to prep work: vegetables quartered and seasoned, the turkey buttered and ready, a cornbread dressing that required more steps than he'd expected and produced something that smelled, when it came out of the oven, like it had been doing this for generations.
Stu managed Annie, the table, and two trips to the grocery store for things Amber hadn't needed until she needed them, which he accomplished without complaint and with the quiet efficiency of a man who understood his role in the operation.
Liz joined by video call mid-morning from Atlanta, her face appearing on the laptop Stu propped against the kitchen backsplash, her voice filling the room with the particular warm frequency of a woman who is both genuinely happy and genuinely far away.
She talked to Amber about the pregnancy, talked to Annie about kindergarten and received a complete report that took eleven minutes, talked to Gary with the specific, searching attention she'd always had for him — reading whatever wasn't being said alongside whatever was.
"You look tired," she told him.
"It's been a busy semester," Gary said.
"Is that what we're calling it?"
He smiled. "Happy Thanksgiving, Liz."
"Happy Thanksgiving, Gary." A pause, the kind she used when she was deciding how much to say. "You okay?"
"Better every week," he said. Which was true, in most of the ways that mattered.
She held his gaze through the screen for a moment longer, apparently found whatever she was looking for, and let it go. "Alright. Tell me about Texas."
The table that afternoon was the right size for what it needed to hold — Stu and Amber and Annie, Gary, Stu's colleague from the engineering department who lived alone and had been invited with the straightforward warmth that Amber extended to most people, and the video screen propped at one end with Liz eating her own Thanksgiving dinner in Atlanta in what appeared to be excellent company.
The turkey was everything the brine had promised.
The cornbread dressing was, Gary felt, a legitimate achievement on his part, though Amber was diplomatic about assigning credit.
Annie ate approximately six bites of food and focused the remainder of her Thanksgiving energy on Marv, who received, over the course of the afternoon, more table scraps than Gary was prepared to officially acknowledge and looked thoroughly at peace with the holiday.
After dinner, while Amber napped and Annie did the same in her bedroom with Marv installed on the floor beside her like a draft stopper, Gary and Stu sat on the back porch with the last of the bourbon and the cooling afternoon.
They sat without talking for a while, which was one of the more reliable pleasures of a friendship that had been running long enough to be comfortable in its own silences.
"How are you actually doing?" Stu said eventually.
Gary thought about the honest answer — the full version, the one with Brett, the tunnels, Belle, Bill, two meetings in a corner restaurant with a district attorney named David who wore tuxedos to Halloween parties.
He thought about how much of that Stu needed to know versus how much of it would require Stu to do something about it.
"Good," Gary said. "Genuinely. The classes are going well. The rhythm out here feels right." He turned his glass slowly. "I think I'm going to finish the degree."
"I know you are," Stu said, with the specific certainty of a man who has arranged the conditions for an outcome and considers the outcome a formality.
"Thanks for this," Gary said. "All of it. The setup, the dinners, the—" He gestured vaguely at the house, the back yard, the general territory of the last two months. "It's been good for me."
Stu looked at him with the direct, undemonstrative affection of a man who does not make speeches about friendship but has one or two things he means very specifically. "You'd have done the same," he said.
Gary thought about the fountain. The streaking incident. The Rosetown summer, the Naked Mile, every stupid, genuine, somehow-surviving-intact thing their friendship had been built from over the better part of two decades.
"Yeah," he said. "I would have."
They finished the bourbon. The afternoon light went long and gold across the back yard. Somewhere inside the house, Marv made a sound in his sleep that was probably about squirrels.
Gary sat on Stu's back porch in Renton, Texas on Thanksgiving afternoon and felt, for the first time in a long time, like a man who was exactly where he was supposed to be — even if what surrounded him was considerably more complicated than the view from the porch suggested.
That seemed, on balance, about right.
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