Quinn's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 21
The holidays arrived. Quinn moved through them carefully.
That was the word for it: carefully, the attention you bring to something that could break. He had not expected to feel the way he felt about Thanksgiving and Christmas in the Colonel’s house; he had not prepared for it the way he prepared for other things because he hadn’t known to prepare for it.
The actual experience turned out to be significant.
Thanksgiving in Maria’s kitchen was full of frantic operations that started two days before. Delicious smells arrived in layers as the day approached — the stock for the gravy coming first. The dressings came next. The house filled with a deep, rich smell that he, to the end of his days, would connect with Maria.
Quinn moved through the house in a daze. The big day came, and the Colonel’s table had six people at it — the Colonel, Sullivan and Maria, Ms. O’Toole, Yaakov, and a shy woman named Shira, whom he introduced as his wife with the pride of a man utterly in love with his woman.
Quinn sat down at the table in his chair and looked at the length of it — the big turkey bird and all the rest of the feast, along with the laughter of the guests, and felt the unexpected thing.
This was what family was.
The feeling had all the warmth of the kitchen, the weight of Maria’s arms when she hugged him, and the Colonel’s handwriting on the margins of his books, and it had the full weight of everything those things meant.
He had grown up carefully, not wanting anything or any place. The logic was sound and had been proved repeatedly: people and things always get taken away. You made sure nothing was so important that its loss would break you.
And now here it was. His family was: Maria’s voice singing Puerto Rican songs in the kitchen, the Colonel’s questions, Sullivan’s almost jokes, the library with its walls of books, Sheila’s unchanged laugh, Keiko’s mischief, and Katherine’s sly truths.
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