Holiday Homecoming by Jillian Hart

obvious hurry to get home.
    Home. How was he going to make it through the next twenty-four hours when he hadn’t even reached his mom’s house and he was already dragging up the past? And feeling torn apart by it. He didn’t know. He didn’t have any answers. He flipped down the visor and winced at his reflection in the mirror. He took one look at his red-rimmed eyes, dark spikes of hair that looked like a twister tore through them and a day’s growth shadowing his jaw.
    Yeah, Mom’s gonna take one look at me and start right in. Ryan could hear it already. She’d want to know if he was sleeping enough, eating right, et cetera, et cetera, and there was no way he could tell her the truth. No way he could drag up the past that would only devastate them both. For her sake, he had to be tough.
    Troubled, he stared out his side of the windshield and blinked. It was the marsh. Buried in snow, the surface rough and choppy due to a few of the hardier, taller reeds and cattails poking through the snow. The marsh where Dad would take him to learn what a man needed to know.
    It wasn’t the hunting. It wasn’t the tracking. It was the self-reliance. The world’s a harsh place, son. Hecould hear Dad’s mellow baritone as clear and true as the day he’d said it. A smart man adapts and perseveres and learns to take care of himself. Look, there’s the elk.
    Ryan saw it perfectly in memory—the proud bull poised at the frozen shore, antlered head lifted to scent the wind on a morning lit by gold and rose, in a world layered with white.
    Yeah, Dad, you sure taught me that lesson well. Ryan swallowed past the knot in his throat, turning his head to watch as the marsh whizzed by and fell behind them. Lost from sight like the past. Yeah, his dad’s death taught him way too much. He’d learned to take care of himself at an early age.
    â€œThis is our exit.” Kristin’s voice sounded thick.
    With excitement? Probably. She had her family waiting, her sisters coming home, her grandparents to draw near. Self-reliance wasn’t something a McKaslin girl needed to know to survive. He realized what felt like envy was really longing. Longing for what could never be.
    You can’t change the past, man, he told himself, although he knew that lesson well, too. The past is gone, done, no sense in letting it in. He was changed. A man he hoped his dad would be proud of. Someone who was about as self-reliant as possible in this world of Internet and cell phones, of urban sprawl and shopping malls.
    â€œLook.” Kristin gestured ahead as she circled off the icy ramp and onto the two-lane road that nosed them toward town. “A lot has changed. Oh, that restaurant isnew. There’s Gramma’s coffee shop. She has a new awning out front. I’ll have to tell her how cute it looks.”
    Ryan scanned the green-and-white-striped awning giving a decidedly Country Living look to the shop that advertised “Espresso” in loopy purple neon. That was the coffee place Mom was always talking about. She’d picked up extra work whenever Kristin’s grandmother needed help.
    That’s when he realized the town, with its old-fashioned main street and neat, sturdy buildings that hadn’t changed since the fifties, had grown up, too. A few quaint restaurants, more cafés than the old red Formica-countered diners, brightened up the faded brick buildings marching down the length of several blocks. Corey’s Hardware had a new neon sign, fresh paint and a bench out front.
    There was a new antique store prettied up with lace curtains in the wide windows. And the Sunshine Café, where, after he’d saved up change from collecting aluminum, he’d splurge on chocolate milkshakes for him and his little sister before handing over the bulk of the hard-earned dollars to his mom.
    â€œDo your cousins still run that place?”
    â€œYeah. They make the best