Chapter 6 - The Showdown at Colfax
Robert was not wearing his church cardigan. He was wearing an old corduroy sports coat that smelled faintly of mothballs, his hair disheveled, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with red. He leaned heavily on his brass-topped cane, but there was nothing frail about the way he struck the linoleum floor with every step.
Behind the counter, the waitresses froze. Two regular customers—a pair of Denver police officers sitting in a booth near the door—looked up from their eggs, their hands resting loosely near their utility belts.
“Where is he?” Robert’s voice thundered through the diner, thick with rage. “Thomas! Get out here!”
Thomas pushed through the swinging kitchen doors. His face was a mask of cold granite. He wiped his hands on his apron and stepped into the center aisle, ten feet from his father.
“Keep your voice down, Robert,” Thomas said, his tone flat and dangerously even. “You’re disturbing my customers.”
“Don’t you dare tell me to keep my voice down!” Robert roared, raising his cane and shaking it toward Thomas’s face. “You sent a process server to my house! You turned off your mother’s cards! You humiliated this family on the internet! Janice has clients canceling listings! Tyler is locked in his room crying!”
“Tyler should have thought about that before he pointed his camera at my six-year-old son,” Thomas said.
“They were helping!” Robert shouted, stepping closer, his spit spraying across the counter. “They are children! You have spoiled them rotten because you feel guilty that their mothers abandoned them! You think you’re a big man because you own a few frying pans and a stack of cash? You are nothing! You are a boy who couldn't keep a wife, and now you’re taking your failures out on your own flesh and blood!”
The diner fell into a pin-drop silence.
A woman in a booth nearby gasped, covering her mouth. The two police officers slowly slid out of their seats and stood up, their eyes fixed on Robert.
Thomas didn't flinch. He didn't blink. The insults that used to cut him to the bone when he was twenty-two now sounded like the buzzing of a dying wasp. Pathetic. Powerless.
“You have thirty days to get out of the house, Robert,” Thomas said quietly.
“We are not leaving!” Robert screamed, his face turning an alarming shade of eggplant. “That is my home! You bought that house for us! You owe us! We raised you! We gave you life!”
“You didn’t give me a home, Robert,” Thomas replied, his voice calm, clear, and ringing through every corner of the room. “You let your pension go belly-up because you were too proud to take an honest job at fifty-five. You sat on your porch while I worked twenty hours a day to keep the bank from taking your furniture. I bought that house so my mother wouldn't end up in a homeless shelter.”
Thomas took one slow step forward. Though he was shorter than his father, his broad shoulders and the sheer weight of his presence made Robert instinctively step back.
“I paid for your roof,” Thomas said. “I paid for your car. I paid for the pills that keep your heart beating. And in return, you took my ten-year-old daughter and made her wash grease off dishes. You locked my asthmatic son’s medicine in your trunk. And you told my baby boy that he was a stray who had to earn his keep.”
“That’s enough!” Robert stammered, his bravado beginning to crack under the icy fury in his son’s eyes.
“It is enough,” Thomas agreed. “It’s over. The bank account is closed. The Mercedes is going back to the dealership on Wednesday. And if you or Helen set foot within five hundred feet of my children again, I will file for a permanent restraining order and bring the venue’s surveillance footage to the Denver district attorney for child endangerment.”
Robert’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. He looked around the diner.
The eyes staring back at him were not sympathetic. The waitresses looked at him with sheer disgust. The cook, Maria, stood by the pass holding a butcher knife, her jaw clenched tight. The two police officers had moved behind him, their expressions stone cold.
“Sir,” one of the officers said, resting a heavy hand on Robert’s shoulder. “I think it’s time for you to leave. Right now.”
Robert pulled his shoulder away, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. He looked at Thomas, searching for the boy he used to bully into submission, the boy who would apologize just to keep the peace.
He found nothing. Thomas’s eyes were like two slabs of mountain slate.
“You’ll regret this,” Robert choked out, his voice trembling with a mixture of hatred and terror. “When you’re old, Thomas... when you’re old and dying alone because no one could ever love you... you’ll remember this day.”
“I’m not alone, Robert,” Thomas said softly, glancing toward the kitchen door where three small faces were peeking through the round window. “I have my children. And unlike you, they will never have to earn my love with an apron.”
May you like
The officer guided Robert firmly toward the exit. The front door swung shut, the little brass bell chimed once, and the dining room returned to the steady, comforting hum of breakfast on Colfax.
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