Thanksgiving

An excerpt from “6 Blocks Home”

She finally understood why most people looked forward to Thanksgiving dinner: the food was divine. Although her parents celebrated Thanksgiving, most of the food they ate they picked up from a restaurant the day before and reheated. Today, Sam had her first taste of a real, honest-to-goodness Thanksgiving meal. She overstuffed herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret it.

As Sam shoveled pecan pie into her mouth long after most of the kids had finished and left the table, she wondered if anything about her life before her parents’ accident had actually been normal.

This was normal — great, sprawling families eating a hearty, home-cooked feast together, toasting to the things that made them thankful, playing games and watching football and snickering at Grandpa snoozing in the recliner. As much as she missed her parents and wanted them to get well, the world into which the Howards had welcomed her filled her up in a way nothing else ever had.