“Do you know where your mom is?”
Lance didn’t move. The moment for bravery had come. The bravery that his mother had lacked for so many years. He swallowed once and shook his head from side to side, the whole while his peripheral vision outlining the shape of his father standing motionless in the doorway.
The sheriff didn’t waver in his inspection of Lance’s face. His eyes roamed up and down and then back and forth, no doubt categorizing each discoloration that had been an ugly bruise several days before.
Finally the sheriff blinked and nodded, the bill of his baseball cap shading his face from view. When he looked up again, there was a painful smile etched onto his whisker-studded face.
“You ever need to tell me something, you just call me, okay, son?” As he said the words, the sheriff handed Lance a light brown business card embossed with a shiny golden badge in the middle. Lance thought it looked like a crown of some sort, the kind a king might wear. Without looking up, Lance bobbed his head and blinked back thick tears that were beginning to form on the surfaces of his eyes.
“Get back inside here now,” Anthony said, and Lance obeyed, stepping up the stairs and edging past his father as he shoved the sheriff’s card deep into his pocket. Rage seemed to boil off Anthony, and Lance imagined he could almost feel it roll over him like heat as he stepped past his father, into the kitchen. Lance was about to sneak off to his room and prepare himself for what was to come when he heard the sheriff speak again.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Metzger, and you listen well, since I’m only going to say it once.” The sheriff paused and Lance wondered if the break in the sentence was for his benefit. Lance made it to his room, shut the door loudly, and began to sneak back toward the kitchen. He knew his ruse had worked when he heard the sheriff’s deep voice again. “I see one mark on that boy ever again, I’ll find you, and I won’t be wearing this badge.”
Lance crouched at the entrance to the kitchen and peered around the corner with one eye as before. The sheriff stood a few inches from his father, with one thick finger poking the other man in the chest. Lance could see his father’s shoulders hunched in anger, and he could picture the snarl that would be curled on his mouth.
“I’ll tell you something, Sheriff. You ever come on my property without that badge, there’ll be a reckoning.” Lance saw the sheriff’s brown eyes darken to black at the words. A small smile, very much unlike the one he had given Lance outside, crept across his lips.
“Oh, you can count on that, Metzger. A definite reckoning.”
With that, the sheriff pulled his finger back from Anthony’s chest and walked down the stairs, and a moment later Lance heard the door of what he could only assume was a police cruiser slam shut. The sound snapped him out of his trance and he made his way back down the hallway. He waited for the moment when his father slammed the outside door to open the door to his room, and without a sound he slipped inside.
Lance sat on his bed, the springs creaking tiredly, and waited. The wind was picking up again, and even though the morning sunshine was beginning to reach into his room with golden fingers, Lance’s stomach was filling up with dread. He waited; the soft ticking of his clock was a scythe cutting the air, and each swish of that blade of time increased his trepidation. Just when he began to think he might escape, that he might just have lucked out, and the tight coils of fear began to loosen, releasing his body from its hold, he heard what he had been waiting for.
Heavy footsteps were coming down the hall toward his room, and not for the first time, Lance wondered how a man so slender could carry such a heavy tread with each step. His erratic musings were cut short as the door to his room flung open with enough force to bounce off the wall behind it and rebound slightly.
His father stood there in the doorway, his form hunched and his fists balled tight.