“What?”her father asked.
“I like the diner,” Dalton began as the back door banged and her mother stepped in. “It’s not?—”
“Mary, did you hear this?” Dad demanded.
“Goodness, what is it?” Mom asked as she pulled her boots off.
“This young man says he doesn’t want to interfere with our Thanksgiving tradition, so he’s spending Thursday at thediner,” Dad repeated indignantly. “What do you think of that?”
“I think it’s horse hockey,” Mom said firmly, turning to Dalton. “Pardon my French, but that’s exactly what it is.”
“She’s right,” Dad cackled. “She’s absolutely right.”
“Now you won’t set one foot in that diner, Dalton Tyler,” Mom told Dalton, who looked a bit like a deer in the headlights. “I forbid it. You’re staying right here for Thanksgiving, where you belong.”
“If you’re sure it won’t be an imposition,” he mumbled, dropping his gaze to his feet, but not before Ella saw that aching look in his eyes again.
“How could you be an imposition, son?” Dad asked gently.
“I don’t know what we would have done without you this year,” Mom said, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. “You’re part of this family now, and family can’t impose. Now with that in mind, could I get you to help me get down my slow cooker? It’s up on that top shelf, and I can’t reach it without my step stool.”
And just like that, Dalton was looking content again as he got right to work fishing the slow cooker out of an upper cabinet for her mother, and the pretty pie pans too.
Later that evening,Ella decided to grab a book from the shelf in the living room. The harvest had kept her too busy to go to the library, but she had started reading a chapter or two in bed each night to soothe her mind after she moved home, and the habit stuck. These days, she kept one book on the table in the living room and another by her bed.
Stepping into the lamplit room, she was surprised to find Dalton there. He sat on the floor, cleaning his boots over a section of newspaper.
The earthy scent of the wax reminded her of the afternoons when she and her brother had done the same, under Dad’s watchful eye.
“Sorry,” he said. “Your dad caught me doing this on the porch, and said it was too cold out.”
“It’s fine,” Ella laughed. “Your boots will last forever that way.”
“So they trained us,” he said with a half-smile. “Some habits stick.”
She smiled at the reference to habits, when she had just been thinking the same about her two-book hobby.
“Listen,” she said, lowering herself to the floor opposite him. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot about the holiday earlier.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “You guys are really nice, being so welcoming to me.”
“But we shouldn’t be keeping you from your family,” Ella said softly. “Not at Thanksgiving, and probably not at all in the first place. You don’t owe Andy, or us, anything.”
“I made a promise—” he began.
“And you of all people know that Andy would never have held you to it,” Ella said. “You helped him so much. And now you’ve helped us too, through a whole harvest. You’ve been amazing. But this is too much, your own family?—”
“I don’t have any family,” he said suddenly.
“What are you talking about?” she asked him.
He sighed out a breath, his eyes still on his shoes, then put down the rag he was holding and met her eyes.
“I grew up in the system,” he told her. “And I made some really bad choices.”
“Everybody makes bad choices,” she said automatically as she tried to process this new information. “You were a kid.”
“My bad choices kept the people who wanted to help me at arm’s length,” he said, shrugging.
