After a time, John reached out and topped his glass off again, but when he offered it to Lance, the younger man waved it off, feeling too full and too drunk already.
“May wasn’t ever the same after that. She said she’d made her peace, had forgiven me for my unforgivable mistake, said she still loved me, but I could tell. Something broke inside her, and when it did, it gave passage to the disease that claimed her years later.”
“John, you can’t—” Lance began, but John’s words, louder than before, cut his off.
“Can’t what? Say things for what they were? I saw it. I took care of her as she passed from this world to the next, and Henry’s face was the only reflection in her eyes, not mine. And I don’t blame her a bit.” John shuffled his feet below the table and sat back in his chair, his blood-red eyes staring straight at Lance. “You try to get along in life without being noticed too much. Just try to make a living and take care of your family without disturbing something that might come back at you with teeth. Life is a shattered glass that we’re all treadin’ on, tryin’ not to crack it any further lest we all fall through. I know that what happened to Henry was punishment for not setting things right at that house,” he continued. “I saw Erwin was beating them and I did nothing. I’m as much to blame for what happened to you as I am for my Henry. I put my own ambitions and employment before the needs of others. And now I’m reaping it.” He turned the brown-tinted glass in one hand. “And this is all I have left.” He raised it and took a long pull before setting it down in the center of the watery ring it had left on the table.
“You can’t carry it all on your shoulders. The world has too many avenues to pinpoint one as the wrong choice. My father might have been a lunatic even if he had a good family life, you never know,” Lance said, staring across the kitchen at the ticking hand of the clock over the stove.
“Yes, that’s what kills me sometimes, never knowing,” John said.
The oppressive stillness surrounded them, huddled close, until Lance asked the question he had been wondering since he first heard Harold speak his family’s name. “What happened to them, my grandparents?”
John shifted in his chair and seemed to come out of the fog the past had enveloped him in. “Your father moved out the year he turned eighteen, wasn’t a surprise to anyone in the area. Erwin and Annette kept on like they had all along; they were considered recluses by most. They didn’t socialize much on account of how Erwin looked, I imagine. No, they kept to themselves until a man by the name of Aaron Haff came to town. He just showed up one day—no one saw him arrive or how he got here—and he started asking a few questions around town.” John turned his head and looked at Lance, his eyes showing no signs of the whiskey coursing through him. “Asking about your grandfather. He stayed about a week, befriended Harold and Josie’s daughter actually, before he went up to your grandparents’ house one afternoon, walked in the front door, and shot Erwin through the head.”
The clock’s ticking became the loudest sound in the house as Lance leaned forward, sure he hadn’t heard the old man correctly. “Someone murdered him?” he asked.
John nodded again, sipping more genially out of his cup. “From what the police gathered, he came in, pointed a gun at Annette and Erwin, and made Erwin kneel down on the floor of the living room. Blew his brains out with a forty-five.”