Chapter 17
Texas Toast
Gary drove back to campus that Thursday night with the specific, depleted lightness of a man who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and has just set it down.
Not celebration exactly — that would come later, if it came at all — just the quiet, physical relief of a weight that was no longer there.
He fed Marv. Poured a finger of the Steele ten-year that was still on his counter from the bottles Lou had given him. Sat at the kitchen table and drank it slowly and let the evening be over.
His phone produced a steady trickle of messages through the night — David confirming logistics, Sue sending a single line that contained more warmth than most people managed in paragraphs, Belle a little after midnight: I heard. Are you okay?
Yeah, he wrote back. Get some sleep.
You too, she said. You did good.
He looked at that for a moment in the kitchen quiet.
Then he went to bed.
? ? ?
Lou called the next morning before Gary had finished his first coffee.
The conversation lasted twenty minutes and covered very little ground in terms of information — Lou already knew the broad shape of what had happened, David's office had handled the notification with the appropriate care — but that wasn't really what the call was about.
It was about Lou needing to say something to Gary directly, in his own voice, without an intermediary.
"I don't know how to do this properly," Lou said, at the point in the conversation where the information had run out and what remained was something else. "Thank you doesn't cover it. I've been trying to find the words since last night and I don't have them."
"You don't need them," Gary said.
"I do, though." A pause, Lou's voice carrying the particular roughness of a man who does not generally have these conversations and is having one anyway.
"You spent five months on this property.
You worked those Thursdays and you saw what was happening and you — you protected it.
You protected her." He meant the property, Gary understood.
He also meant Nancy. Possibly Belle. Possibly all of it at once.
"The Steele name means something to me. To my mother. It's — it's everything we have."
"I know," Gary said.
"If you ever need anything," Lou said. "Anything at all. You call. You don't explain or justify or ask if it's too much. You just call."
Gary looked at the kitchen window, the March morning outside, Marv on the floor at his feet.
"I will," he said. And meant it.
Nancy called an hour later and cried for the first three minutes without saying anything coherent, which Gary sat with patiently; then she composed herself and said "I have been doing this for sixty years and I am not going to cry in front of someone half my age" and laughed at herself, which was the most Nancy thing Gary had ever heard; then they talked properly for another thirty minutes about nothing in particular while both of them understood what the conversation was actually about.
Before they hung up, she also made him promise that if he ever needed anything—anything at all—he wouldn't hesitate to reach out.
He promised.
? ? ?
The DA's office worked quickly. The arrests happened within forty-eight hours of the Thursday transaction — Brett first, picked up at his house in the early morning with the methodical efficiency of people who had been building toward this for months and weren't going to introduce uncertainty by waiting.
Jed proved harder to locate, which David had anticipated, but was found two days later in a motel outside the county and brought in without significant incident, which Gary gathered from the tone of David's text meant there had been some incident but nothing worth elaborating on.
The restaurant owner's situation was, as David had said, a federal matter, and moved into different hands at a speed that suggested those hands had also been waiting.
Most of the product was recovered. The three barrels moved on Christmas Eve and the twelve from the March operation were located through the transaction records and the cooperation of the restaurant staff and returned to the Steele property within two weeks — the older barrels handled with the specific, careful reverence of people who understood they were transporting something irreplaceable.
Lou texted Gary a photograph when the last barrel was back in its rack.
Just the barrel. No message.
Gary looked at it for a long moment and then typed back: Good.
? ? ?
Life resumed the shape it had in the fall, which was the shape Gary had come to rely on.
Classes. Gym. Café Texas. Office hours, which were crowded now as the semester moved toward finals and students arrived with the specific urgency of people who had left things longer than they should have.
Saturdays with the line dancing class, where Ethel had declared his footwork acceptable, which Gary understood to be the highest available praise and received accordingly.
Sundays at Stu's, where Amber was moving through the final stage of her pregnancy with the focused, slightly impatient energy of a woman who has completed the work and is ready for the result.
March ended. April arrived.
? ? ?
Stewart Junior announced himself on a Tuesday morning in early April, in the practical, no-nonsense way of a person who had decided the timing was correct and acted accordingly.
Seven pounds, four ounces, healthy and loud and possessed, from the very beginning, of the specific alert quality that suggested he was going to be paying close attention to everything around him, which was either Amber's influence or Stu's or the particular combination of both that tends to produce people who are excellent at understanding systems.
Gary got the call from Stu at six forty-seven in the morning, which meant Stu had waited until a reasonable hour specifically because Gary had told him at some point that anything before seven was an aggressive opening to a conversation.
"He's here," Stu said. The two words carried everything — the specific compressed weight of a man who has just experienced something that has permanently rearranged what he thought he understood about his own life.
"How are they?" Gary said.
"Perfect." A pause. "Both of them." Another pause. "Annie, is currently conducting a very detailed inspection of her brother with a level of authority that honestly concerns me."
Gary laughed. "I'll be there tonight."
He stopped at the store on the way, found a bottle of good champagne — not the Steele bourbon, which felt like the wrong note for a different reason — and drove to the hospital with Marv in the back seat and the bottle in a paper bag on the passenger seat.
Stewart Junior was, in Gary's objective assessment, an excellent baby.
He had the compact, slightly astonished look of a person who has very recently arrived somewhere and is still working out the details.
He had Stu's ears and Amber's chin and the general expression of a person who has opinions but is not yet in a position to articulate them, which Gary found deeply relatable.
Annie had positioned herself in the chair beside Amber's bed with the proprietary composure of a senior colleague managing a new hire.
Gary sat on the edge of the windowsill and looked at his oldest friend holding his son and felt something he didn't immediately try to name. Just sat with it for a moment.
Stu looked up. The expression on his face was one Gary had never seen from him — the specific, slightly undone look of a man who has been precise about everything his entire life and has just encountered something that precision cannot account for.
"He's something," Gary said.
"Yeah," Stu said. "He really is."
Gary produced the champagne. Amber received it with the warmth of a woman who had earned it thoroughly and intended to drink exactly one glass of it when the timing was right.
He found plastic cups from somewhere in the room, poured a measure into each, and handed them around — Stu, Amber, himself, and a small pour of water for Annie who received it with the gravity of a child participating in a formal ceremony.
Gary raised his cup.
"To Texas," he said.
Stu looked at him with the full weight of twenty years of friendship in the expression.
"To Texas," he said.
"To Lil Stewy," Amber said, with the particular warmth she brought to most things.
"To Lil Stewy!" Everyone said, with considerably more volume than the hospital setting technically recommended, they all drank, Stewart Junior slept through the entire ceremony with the profound unconcern of a baby who had a long life ahead of him and saw no reason to rush any of it.
? ? ?
Belle and Gary texted through April with the frequency of two people who have been through something significant together and are figuring out what that means in the aftermath.
Gary had wanted to finish his promise to her that Jed would remain in jail when this was all over.
The conversations were warm, honest, and carefully calibrated to what was actually possible—Brett was behind bars, Jed was navigating the legal systems of three separate jurisdictions and losing, and the consensus between Gary and Belle, reached without much discussion because it hardly needed any, was that distance was the right answer for now.
She was finishing her coursework. He was finishing his. The semester had a specific momentum and they were both inside it and the space the plan had occupied in both their lives was now empty in a way that needed to be filled with something other than each other, at least for the moment.
She texted him on a Wednesday in mid-April: How are you actually doing?
He thought about it honestly before answering.
Good, he wrote. Ready to finish this chapter.
A pause. Then: Me too. I think that's the right answer for both of us.
Yeah, he wrote back. I think it is.
They didn't text much after that. Not because anything had ended badly, but because some things concluded naturally and the natural conclusion of this one was two people putting their energy back into the lives they were building rather than the situation that had brought them together.
Gary felt the rightness of it without finding it entirely easy, which was, he'd learned, usually how the right things felt.
? ? ?
Finals arrived in the first week of May with the compressed, urgent quality of an ending that had been visible from October and had arrived anyway faster than expected.
Gary had two papers, one presentation, and a seminar participation grade that Jenkins had told him, with the directness of a man who considered false reassurance a waste of everyone's time, was not in question.
He wrote the papers in the evenings with Marv at his feet and the windows open to the warm May air of the Texas spring, which was what Texas summer was going to be in a month and was currently the best possible version of itself.
He wrote well — better than he'd written in any academic context he could remember, which he attributed partly to having things to say and partly to having had the kind of year that tends to clarify what matters and what doesn't.
He submitted the final paper on a Thursday evening and sat in his apartment in the quiet afterward and thought: I'm going to have a degree.
Not a plan, not an intention, not a thing he was working toward. A fact, arriving slightly ahead of the paperwork that would confirm it.
He sat with that for a while.
Marv regarded him from the floor with the patient, affectionate attention of a creature who had been present for all of it in the past year — Rosetown, the loft, the two-day drive, the divorce party, the Steele farm, the county road in March, the Christmas Eve quiet of a campus after a wire had done its job — and found Gary's continued existence in all of these circumstances to be, on balance, satisfactory.
Gary reached down and put his hand on Marv's enormous head.
"Almost," he said.
? ? ?
Because there was still one thing remaining.
David had mentioned it in March, during the planning conversations, as the third event. The one Gary had mentally filed as later while everything else was more immediate. Now later had arrived and was identifying itself clearly.
The last rodeo of the professional bull riding season. The circuit finale, held annually in mid-May, large enough to draw fifteen thousand people and broadcast regionally. The event where the season standings were finalized and the champion was crowned.
Jed Calloway, despite an active legal case, a pending trial date, and the general chaos of his recent biography, was still technically eligible to compete.
His lawyer had argued successfully for a continuance on the trial timeline that kept him out of custody pending proceedings, which meant he was legally free to ride.
The circuit, which ran on its own set of considerations, had not yet suspended him — the Idaho felony was under appeal, the current charges were pending, and until something was formally adjudicated, he remained on the roster.
He was the heavy favorite to win the season title.
David had explained, over a few drinks, the third event with the careful specificity of a man laying out something he had thought through from multiple angles.
"Jed's lawyer is building a character case," David said.
"Productive member of the community, professional athlete, family man.
The circuit title would be the centerpiece of that argument.
A championship at the finale becomes Exhibit A in a narrative about a man whose life is more than his mistakes. "
"So we need him not to win," Gary said.
"We need the jury pool to see him clearly," David said. "Before the trial, not after."
Gary had looked at him for a moment. "What does that mean exactly?"
David had smiled — the rare version, the one that appeared when something was about to be asked that David found professionally interesting. "It means we need someone in that arena who knows how to work a crowd."
Gary had sat with that for a long moment.
Then he'd laughed.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, in the place where the good stories lived, he'd felt the shape of the whole thing clicking into its final piece.
The rodeo was in two weeks.
He had one semester's worth of a master's degree in his pocket and the specific, seasoned readiness of a man who had spent the better part of a year navigating something complicated and had arrived at the end of it still standing.
He was going to need a clown suit.