Harold glanced at Mary, who now stood beside Lance, a hand resting on the back of his arm. He then looked back at Lance, who had leaned farther toward him, his eyes wide in his pale face.
“Umm, something Italian. He moved away after he graduated.” Harold scratched his balding head, and then nodded with assurance. “Anthony. His name was Anthony.”
The Land Rover slid to a stop a few feet from John’s garage door, the brightness of the headlights blinding on the white paint. Lance threw the gear into park and turned the ignition off so forcefully that the key nearly snapped off in the narrow slot.
His feet crunched across the gravel and then became silent in the softness of the grass, the cold dew wetting through the tips of his shoes. Through the red glaze of rage that filmed his narrowed eyes, Lance saw a light come on in the living room of the house. The steps of the front porch groaned under his weight as he launched himself up them. He punched the doorbell with his fist, feeling skin tear from his knuckles and hearing the plastic around the button crack.
He could still hear his father’s name sliding off Harold’s lips, still feel his legs giving way and the seat of the barstool connecting with his lower back. Mary had braced him, and if it hadn’t been for her hands, he would have fallen onto the floor of the restaurant. His father’s face had replayed over and over in his mind, sliding back behind the rock pillar, the crooked smile playing at his lips. As the shock set in and questions, too many and too fast to register, ripped through his mind, something else began to build there. Anger, so deep and pure it seemed elemental, pulsed in time with the image of John’s face. He could hear the caretaker’s words from the first day they had met again: There’s nothing for you here. They had echoed in his mind as he sped from the restaurant to John’s home.
Lance felt his fists clench as the inner door opened before him and John’s sleep-addled face peered out. The screen door was suddenly open and Lance was through it. John stumbled back from the thrust of Lance’s outstretched hands, his old legs unable to keep up with the velocity of the shove. John cried out as he hit the wall behind him and began to slide down it like a wet sponge. He wore only a pair of flannel pants and his pallid flesh sagged with age above the waistline, but Lance felt no pity or regret. Rage of the kind he had never experienced before coursed through him, a thrumming energy that tingled in his muscles and propelled him effortlessly through space.
“Lance, what—” John began, but then Lance’s hands were around his throat, pulling him into a standing position and pressing him against the wall. Garbled sounds rasped from John’s open mouth as Lance leaned closer, hissing through clenched teeth that his anger refused to unlock.
“Shut the fuck up! You knew my father! You knew who I was the moment you laid eyes on me!”
John blinked and tried to suck in a choked breath, but Lance pushed harder on the soft skin at the other man’s neck. He could feel the power in his hands, the urge to crush the life out of the man before him, the anger building exponentially. An image of his father pushing his mother against the wall flashed across his mind. His father’s teeth bared in exactly the same grimace that pulled at his own face now.
Instantly, he felt his hands go slack and fall to his sides.