Page 75 of The Evening Wolves

John-Henry pushed through the throng near the entrance, ignoring angry shouts and gasps of outrage as he forced a path into the restaurant. A man in a tux glared at him from behind a wooden stand and said, “Excuse me, sir—”

But John-Henry ignored him, turning in place, stretching up onto tiptoe to scan the dining room. So many people. A quartet was playing, the instruments competing with a mustachioed man who struggled to rise from his seat as he belted out the first words of “Auld Lang Syne.” His companions, middle-aged women with matching mousey lobs of hair, stared up at him admiringly. A child who couldn’t have been older than six darted past John-Henry, screaming as he dragged a tablecloth behind him, while a scrawny guy in a bow tie hurried after him saying, “Ian, stop. Ian, please stop!” At the bar, a glass broke, and a pair of women who had toned and tanned themselves to lizard-like perfection shrieked with laughter. And then John-Henry heard it: the growl, the rumble, the crack like thunder. He pushed past the maître d’ and stepped into the next room.

Emery loomed over a table, talking in a low voice, but his tone carried. John-Henry knew some of the men and women at the table, but not all of them: Drew Klein, of course, who had been his friend back in high school, with a spare tire around his waist now and a double chin he’d tried to hide with a goatee; his wife, Katie, who apparently had opted for adult braces since the last time John-Henry had seen her; Redgie Moseby, big and bullnecked and red-faced, who hadn’t said a word to John-Henry since Emery had first come back, since that day John-Henry had popped him one; his wife, Kenzi, with her narrow face and Phoebe-from-Friends haircut, which, as far as John-Henry knew, had never really taken off like the Rachel. The others he recognized from school events and from passing them in the Piggly-Wiggly, all of them white, all of them in their late thirties to early forties, all of them in that sneeringly middle-class niche of luxury vehicles and McMansions, all of them, of course, cishet couples.

Hearing those thoughts, how different he sounded from the person he’d been not so long ago, was like hearing someone in another room. Because if things had been different, he’d be sitting here with Cora, and he’d have a drink in his hand, and he’d be getting louder as Cora tried to shush him, and he’d be getting raunchier, and he’d be looking down Kenzi-from-Friends’s dress, and inside he’d be going at himself with a knife because he was living a lie, and drinking was one way to keep it all at arm’s length.

“—fucking educate you,” Emery was saying in that dead voice as John-Henry reached them. “Stand up.”

Redgie’s face got even redder. Drew had a shiny Rudolph nose. The other men at the table—there were four more of them—were torn between looking away, looking down, and trying to glare at Emery. If he noticed the glares, he didn’t give any sign of it.

“Ree,” John-Henry said, taking his arm at the elbow. “Let’s step outside.”

“I’m handling something.” He slid his gaze from Drew to Redgie. “Are you going to make me drag your ass out of that chair?”

“Fuck off,” Redgie said.

“Get the manager,” Katie was stage-whispering, clawing at Drew. “Go get the manager.”

“You can’t come in here and ruin our night like this,” Drew said. “You have to leave. They’ll make you leave.”

“You’re afraid I’ll ruin your night?” Emery pointed to a table farther back in the room, where a cluster of teens was watching the confrontation unfold. Among them, John-Henry recognized Allen Klein, Scotty Moseby, and plenty more little charmers from Wahredua High. “Then you should have kept your reprobate sons on a fucking leash.”

John-Henry tightened his grip. “Ree, I want to talk to you.”

Emery’s gaze flicked to him and then back to the table. “Are you proud of this? That your boys act like a pack of wild dogs? That they have to gang up on my son because they’re not brave enough to fight him like men.”

“You’re full of shit,” Redgie said and took a long drink of his beer.

“I should have broken your jaw the first time we met,” Emery said. “I never should have let John handle that.”

“Outside,” John-Henry said. He tried to pull, but it was like trying to uproot a tree. “Right now.”

“Let go of me,” Emery snapped.

One of the men at the table burst out laughing, and then several of the women joined in. Another man whispered something to a friend. Drew smirked, leaning back, and said to Katie in a voice meant to carry, “Trouble in paradise.”

“I’m sure it must be a relief to you, Drew, to have someone else occupy everyone’s attention for a moment, instead of this being yet another night when Katie’s tits spill out and she pisses herself and you find her blowing the busboy behind a dumpster.”

It was like someone had turned down the volume on the world. A cold draft moved through the room, and John-Henry would have sworn he could hear the candles gutter.

Emery turned his attention to Redgie. “And, of course, I imagine you’re greatly relieved that, for a while anyway, people will be talking about how Scotty assaulted my son, instead of how he was caught masturbating to the stuffed animals in the preschool.”

Redge’s face was the color of wine, now, and he made a choked noise. Kenzi looked like she wanted to crawl under the table.

“That’s enough,” John-Henry said.

“Why are we just sitting here?” the man who had laughed asked. John-Henry had taken him in earlier, but now he studied him a little more closely: just the right hair, just the right scruff, a square jaw and a wide, amused mouth. “You’re going to let him talk to you like that? He wants to start something, let’s start something.”

“Casey—” The woman next to him said.

“No, this’ll be good. I’ve been hearing about this guy since I moved here.” He pushed back his chair and tossed down his napkin. When he stood, he glanced at the men seated on either side of him. “Get up.”

The other men stood with greater and lesser degrees of reluctance. Even through his escalating panic, John-Henry wanted to laugh. It was like high school all over again: the tough talk, the bravado, and then, when it came down to it, most guys didn’t really want to take a swing. Most.

Redgie pushed back his chair. Drew was staring at Katie, who was draining a glass of wine, but he scrambled out of his seat a moment later.

Emery turned, and John-Henry held on to his arm and was towed toward the front door.

---