“What money have you got?”
“Eleven dollars.”
“That's all?”
“I had fifty when I left. Bus fare, a couple of meals, and a bed at a place by the interstate. I thought I could find work faster.”
“Who sent you away?”
Ethan glanced toward the dark parking lot. “The person who was supposed to be my family.”
Jack rubbed the side of his jaw. Every practical thought told him to point the boy toward the county shelter forty miles east. He had insurance to worry about, tools worth more than his pickup, and no reason to let an unfamiliar young man sleep anywhere near them. He had survived prison, debt, and twenty winters in Red Creek without volunteering for another person's disaster. Yet the shelter was forty miles away, there wasn't a bus until morning, and the boy's lips had taken on the faint blue color Jack remembered from too many bitter nights.
“Have you eaten?” Jack asked.
Ethan opened his mouth, paused, and shook his head.
“Today?”
“No, sir.”
Jack stepped aside. “There's a storage room next to the compressor bay. Cot's narrow, blanket's old, and the wall smells like transmission fluid. One night. You get warm, you eat something, and tomorrow we figure out where you go. Understand?”
Ethan didn't move. Water dripped from his backpack onto the porch. For a moment he looked almost confused, as though he had prepared himself so completely for another refusal that an invitation had no place to land. Then his mouth trembled.
“I asked nine people,” he managed. “Nine people, sir. I stopped expecting anybody to say yes.”
“Well, I already said it once,” Jack grumbled. “Don't make me develop a reputation for repeating myself.”
Ethan stepped through the door, taking care not to brush his wet clothes against the motorcycles. He stopped on the concrete just inside and asked where to leave his shoes. Jack pointed at a rubber mat, tossed him a towel from a clean cabinet, and went to the little kitchen at the back of the building. He warmed a bowl of beef stew, cut two pieces of bread, and found an unopened bottle of water in the refrigerator. He put it all on the workbench without asking how a twenty-year-old had become so frightened of doing something wrong.
Ethan ate slowly for the first three bites. After that, hunger overwhelmed manners, and he finished the stew in a hurry that made Jack look away. The older man pretended to inspect a gasket while the boy scraped the last gravy from the bowl. When Ethan apologized, Jack told him there was no fine for eating food that had been offered. Then he brought out a second helping and turned up the heat.