Quotation

He’d been in this place almost as long as he’d not been in this place. And the time had not gone by fast. It didn’t feel like twenty years. It felt like two hundred. Roy and Lucinda Mars, his white father and black mother. Back then that combination had been weird, different, exotic even, certainly in West Texas. Now it was commonplace. Every kid coming in now looked like bits and pieces of fifty different types of humanity. He would have been forty-two years old in two months. His forty-first had been his very last birthday, as it turned out. He wasn’t going to say anything. They had brought him to the party. They were going to have to start the music. When he was anxious, he ate. When he was really anxious he was a garbage disposal. Decker did not believe in fate, or even its little cousin, serendipity.