Johnny sat back and held up his hands in mock surrender. "Fine, if you insist. It's all your fault, that better? Every single thing that happened to me then, from Elmira to the time my last pair of shoes wore down to nothin', is your fault. Lord Almighty, you're dumber than me if you think that's true. So you started the war. That part's factual. But how much of it did you really control after that? It got too big for you to handle, and that ain't your fault."
He switched away from that train of thought quickly; this wasn't about making his father feel less guilty about things he thought he'd caused. This was about the grossly unfair way his father was trying to control his life after more than a century of not even caring. "Career don't mean nothin' if you don't have someone to be settled with. How's things with Harvey?" he asked, hoping that the new topic might distract Mark enough from his original plans.
Seemed he couldn't be distracted, though. Well, Johnny tried. "Of course it's worth it," he insisted. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and then decided to go on anyway. If Mark wanted to have more of a parental presence in Johnny's life, he would have to deal with things like this. "That place has plagued me since the second I got out. I got it all built up in my mind like this nightmare place, like it's still there full of my boys -- it's stupid but I have to see it's gone, or some part of me's always gonna think it's still there. You wouldn't understand."