But talking with Ella had brought it all back up to the surface again, and he was surprised to be seeing things differently now than he had years ago.
I’m doing the right thing for Andy,he reminded himself.I was a good friend to him, and now I’m helping his family. That’s who I am now.
But he was just a friend. He knew better than to get attached to Andy’s family. That was the real reason he had preferred to spend today at the diner.
However today turned out, he had a feeling he would love it. And it would make him feel a closeness with Andy’s family that wasn’t real, wasn’t earned. Dalton was just a friend of their son’s, passing through to help with the harvest.
But when winter came and there was no more work to do, they wouldn’t want a stranger in their home.
I’ll move on. I’ll find civilian work or I’ll enlist again. I have skills now, and some self-control. I’m not the man I was before.
But it was one thing to have value on paper and another to feel it in your heart.
“You okay over here?” Ella’s gentle voice cut right through his worries and snapped him back to the present.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just cutting up vegetables for the tray. Is this how you guys normally do them?”
“That’s much nicer than we’ve ever done them,” Mary put in from across the room. “It’s like a work of art.”
He glanced down at the tray, where he had carefully arranged a virtual rainbow of peppers, snap peas, broccoli, and carrots and felt a little burst of pride.
“Itdoeslook nice,” Ella said. “How can I help?”
“Oh, Ella,” her mom said. “Could you light the candles?”
“Great idea,” Ella said. “Dove, do you want to walk with me and we can talk about how to be safe with candles?”
“I remember,” Dove said proudly.
“Youdo?” Ella asked her. “Well, why don’t you talk tomeabout it?”
“You never, ever have candles without a grownup,” Dove told her as they headed back toward the living room, clearly delighted to be on the telling end of things. “And you don’t play with matches or you’ll catch on fire...”
“She knows her stuff,” Dalton said, surprised.
“Dove is a wonderful child,” Mary said.
“We’re biased,” Michael added. “But it’s still true.”
“It really is,” Dalton said, nodding.
“She’s growing up with a lot of adults around,” Mary pointed out. “So it stands to reason that she’s more responsible than a lot of kids her age. But I think some of it is just innate.”
“We are who we are,” Michael said, nodding.
“They’re here,”Dove yelled from the front of the house.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mary said. “They’re early. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Michael and Mary hurried for the front door, but Dalton hung back, torn over whether it would be worse to fail to greet the family’s guests, or to insinuate himself into their private moment of reunion.
He settled on applying himself to the last of the vegetables. But before he was finished, the sounds of happy voices rushed toward the kitchen.
“Dalton,” Michael said. “I want you to meet my niece,Lori, and her husband, Dan. Their kids, Danny and Olivia, are playing with Dove in the other room.”
A smiling woman with strawberry-blonde hair and a dark-haired man in an actual polo shirt smiled at him from the doorway.
“Nice to meet you,” Dalton said politely.
