Sugar Pine Trail

“Excellent division of labor.”

He steered the boys over to the sink, where he supervised while they washed their hands, then washed his own.

“All right, guys. What do we need for salad?”

“Lettuce,” Davy said promptly.

“And tomatoes. Except Davy doesn’t like tomatoes.”

“We’ll put those on the side, then.”

All the necessary ingredients for a good tossed salad were in a colander draining in the other sink from the one where they had washed their hands. Jamie put the boys to work ripping up the lettuce into bite-sized pieces while he found a knife and started cutting up the tomatoes, green onions and celery for the salad.

After a few minutes, Julia wandered over to see how they were faring.

“You can handle a kitchen knife,” she said with surprise as she watched him.

He smiled, cutting the avocado in half and slicing it into strips inside the skin with an expert flourish. “My family has a café back home in Colorado. My Pop is more than seventy but still works there every single day. My parents made sure all of us knew our way around a kitchen, so I spent most of my school breaks working there—busing tables, washing dishes, prepping food, working the grill. There’s not much I can’t do.”

What he hadn’t learned at the Center of Hope Cafe kitchen, he taught himself after he first went to school, then military training. A guy could only eat at the mess hall so often—and he quickly got tired of frozen pizzas.

“I can cook,” Clint boasted, bony chin up in the air.

“He makes super good toast and mac and cheese and microwave popcorn,” Davy attested.

“That’s an excellent start. Now you know how to make a basic green salad, too,” Jamie said.

Who were these boys and what were they doing in Julia’s kitchen?

A hundred questions chased around his brain. When she introduced them to him, she said they were staying with her for a while. There was obviously a story here.

You know your mother is not at home. You can’t go home to an empty house, Julia had said to them. Where was home? And where was their mother?

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