Chapter 438: Let Me Introduce Ellen, My Daughter

Way to be a father, David, and scold Ellen for once.

I got her plenty to eat when she stopped crying and apologizing.

I hated to do that so harshly, but she seemed to have needed it.

“I have plenty for you to eat, Ellen, when you are ready,” I told her after she blew her nose and wiped her eyes.

She was ravenous, and I had to stop at the next exit to let her hit the throne while I got her more to eat. We ate there until Ellen had crapped out pretty much everything inside her gut besides what she ate since I picked her up. Once finally sated, we got back on the road. At the next rest stop, I managed to get her to put on panties. Olive’s brothers would be following her around like she was a bitch in heat otherwise.

They will probably follow her around that way, even if she has on panties.

From the GPS data, we were going to get to Olive’s house at around five. They used to be sticklers for a dinner time of six-thirty.

“Hello?” Olive’s mom said, answering the phone.

“Hey, it’s David. I happen to be driving by on my way home, and mom said to give you a call to see if you mind me stopping by,” I told her.

I didn’t think she would mind not having to make dinner tonight.

When we got to the door, I let Ellen ring the doorbell while I stood just outside the doorbell camera view. She introduced herself as Ellen Jones, my daughter.

Oh, this is going to be fun! There is no physical way possible that I have an eleven-year-old daughter. One cooking in a twelve-year-old’s body maybe, but they would never know that.

Calamity ensued as everyone tried to get to the door all at once. It opened inward, and they had a small entry hallway. My cousins ran around from the back of the house. Once they managed to calm down, the door opened to my aunt and uncle standing there looking confused.

“Hey, everyone, this is Ellen, my adopted daughter,” I told them. “We can talk over dinner. Where am I taking you?”

The kids all rushed back around the house to put on clothes suitable to go out to eat, versus the play clothes they had on right now. I told Ellen to get her backpack and find Olive’s room to change for dinner too. I grabbed my bag to put on something a bit nicer as well.

A dinner out was a rare luxury, as in once every other year for their birthday luxury, so the kids weren’t going to waste any time.

We heard a boy shrieking as he headed out the back door toward the woods behind their house. I managed to grab a naked Ellen.

“Not happening, Ellen,” I scolded her. “Go put clothes or your bodysuit on. Don’t you dare hurt him! Bring him back here, and you two can discuss why he ran out of the house?”

I let her go, and she went back into Olive’s room. She came out with Olive a few minutes later to go to the bathroom to work on their hair. I offered but got back one of those ‘girl looks’ that told me to buzz off. Ellen just said that she would do girl things with her cousin, and the boy could come back on his own. She was still pissed at catching him peeping on her changing.

“I don’t think even Terry has been able to make him scream in fear like that. Ellen isn’t modest if she was going to go chase him down in the nude,” my uncle said. “Olive has never gone to do her hair with any of her other cousins. That is something new.”

Since we had to wait for my cousin to decide food overrode Ellen’s anger at him, I told my aunt and uncle, “Might as well let Ellen explain it to the kids, then. I happened to be picking up a group of kids that ran away from their orphanage, home, or foster home. I don’t know about the police there trying to hunt them down like hardened criminals when they hadn’t done anything but run away. Ellen’s dad owned the RV park, where I found those kids hiding out in the geothermal power plant used to power the RV park. Well, it did before Ellen’s dad had someone turn it off after he died. He raised Ellen as a mountain girl or survivalist. She learned how to hunt, fish, clean a kill, start a fire, cook, find clean water, and all the things to keep herself alive. To keep it simple, Ellen’s father’s family did things in their family business that Ellen’s father didn’t think was right, so he left. He knew they would come looking for him to kill him because that is how their family did things. You didn’t walk away from the family business. He built that RV park as a place for him and Ellen to live entirely off the grid and hidden where his family couldn’t find them. Someone tracked them down and killed him when Ellen was only nine. I found that she had someone in town who came to check on her and had to take care of her a few times when she got very sick. They worked out a system that kept her safe from those in her father’s family looking for her.”

“Aren’t you worried that those people are still looking for her?” my aunt asked.

Ellen came over beside me to say, “No. He isn’t, and neither am I. My father taught me how to take down a wolf, deer, and bear, though he preferred I just leave the bears alone. They were too heavy for me to the skin, and the meat wasn’t as good as deer. Not many wolves up that way, but we did have a pack of them come through, so we had to take them all down. We dragged them each a long way out from the RV park in different directions and then marked each with our urine. I never saw another wolf after that. My dad’s family sent their best psychopath to hunt me down. She, and all her goons, went home with my name burned into their eyebrows, in reverse, so they would remember that a nine-year-old girl took them all down. Not that David has anything to worry about from those people. I’ve spoken to people who said that the woman who killed my father fears him much more than me. We know that grandmother would kick his butt if he acted how I did when they came for me.”

In the blink of an eye, Ellen was grabbing my cousin, dragging him to where everyone else was waiting, and said, “I may not be his biological daughter, but that doesn’t mean I don’t run around as nude as April anytime I can. We will talk later about why. Olive is proud of her body now, and she left her door cracked so you could look at her and me naked if you wanted. If you ever do what you did again, I will make sure you learn some manners.”

“I’m sorry,” he said softly.

No amount of demanding or scolding got Ellen, or surprisingly Olive, to say what my cousin did. He didn’t volunteer anything and rushed off to get dressed before we left him there.

We had too many to take only one car, and my aunt drove when everyone was going out together unless she told my uncle he was driving. I told my aunt that I didn’t know where we were going, so my uncle came with me. Ellen decided she liked the idea of sitting between the two boys on the drive over, even if all three were still having to use car seats.

I waited for my aunt to get out of sight before asking my uncle if he could still drive a stick.

“Here. You’re driving,” I told my uncle as I got in the passenger side.

I was nice and went over how this wasn’t an old pickup. My uncle was doing a respectable job of running through the gears by the time we made it to the restaurant. We beat my aunt there, and she gave him a very nasty look when he got out of the driver’s seat of the Lotus.

“Don’t worry about it. Your wife is going to make you drive your old car home. I’ve got her a minivan coming. Your kids are getting too big to sit in car seats, three wide, in the back seat anymore. I would have gotten you something, but we have to wait for her to tell us what you can have, or you will be driving a couch for a long time,” I told him.

He stopped me before we went inside and asked, “You know you are welcome to have the couch, and Ellen will sleep in with Olive or the boys, I suspect. Now, if you would happen to get a few hotel rooms nearby, I could see what I might be able to work out to get something more than a slightly newer, used version of that old beater.”

I pulled out my phone and found that even though they weren’t exactly a chain of hotels, I owned two different upscale ones in town that were a respected name in hotels in this state. I got an oversized suite with a hot tub and a private indoor lap pool reserved. I had some things in mind for pulling this off but would work out the details while we ate.

The place they chose for dinner was at the top of the upscale restaurants for this area. I saw the lobby was packed, but the dining room was only a quarter full. Everyone sat dressed as well as us or better, which seemed to match those who were eating.

“We have around thirty to ninety minutes to wait,” my aunt told me when I came inside.

I didn’t own this restaurant, nor did Elena’s dad or any of their friends. That didn’t mean I had no clue about the game going on. I would show my family that we would wait happily, provided that there was no room for us after all the others waiting were seated. I was in luck when the manager happened to walk up the wait stand.

“Gentlemen, a moment of your time, please?” I asked them.

We went off to the side away from where people would hear us, and I said, “You have a problem that you might want to fix very quickly before it bites you in the wallet.”

“Oh, do tell,” the asshole from the wait stand said.

“I will make it simple. You have a nearly empty dining room and a full lobby. To make money, you want to have a full dining room and people waiting for the tables to get reset,” I told them. “You can get it on the ball, or I can call your owner directly and see if they are happy about it. If they are, then I’m going somewhere else. Oh, my name is David Jones. I happen to own the two large hotels in town. It is why they are upgrading school and church groups to suites if the suites are just sitting empty. I don’t like people having to sleep on the floor when I have beds gathering dust. Plus, it is hard on the carpet. Feel free to call and ask them about me.”

“Oh, just. Whatever,” the person seating people said.

The manager was pissed that I called them on not doing their job.

“Hey,” I said as the person my phone auto-dialed for me answered.

I told them my name and mentioned that I was also a friend of Elena’s dad and where I was standing. I explained how they had a nearly empty dining room and enough people in their lobby to fill most of their tables, but we were all sitting around waiting. I made sure to say that the manager was pissed that I even mentioned it.

The owner said, “I happen to be finishing up a business deal at one of your hotels. I can be over there in about ten minutes with my party to take them to dinner. I haven’t been to that restaurant for dinner, so this will be an interesting experience. Thanks for calling.”

He called in a reservation, under his name, for his party of four. When he arrived, the person at the front told him the wait was now two hours. The manager again happened to be close enough to there when the owner asked to speak with him. I happened to move close enough to move over to hear them.

“You know, if you make people sit around and wait long enough, they are going to leave. Two hours? Why would I wait that long for a meal? Are you short-staffed because the dining room looks almost empty?” he asked

I added in, “That is what I said.”

The manager was pissed now and said, “I refuse to serve either of you or your parties. Please leave before I contact the police to have you removed.”

Hmm. Should I turn my skin green as I flex my muscles?

“Please do. It would be entertaining to see how the police decide that they don’t want to try to remove me,” I told the manager.

The owner said, “David, please. I don’t even want to know the amount of damage that would cause, and the police here are decent, honest people. I wouldn’t do that to them.”

“Oh, ok. It isn’t my problem to deal with this time, so I’m going to go start seating people on the waiting list,” I told him. “I may not know how not to burn water, but I can use a computer, look at a chart of tables, and direct people to seats. Most of these POS systems are very similar.”

I did just that, including my family, until the lobby was empty and with tables available. When someone came in, I got up, found them a table, and seated them. At the same time, I was getting many things done that my aunt and uncle wouldn’t let me do if I asked them, so I didn’t.

When done with dinner, I took them off to the side and said, “You two are going to get in my car and follow the GPS to your new house. It needs to get christened. I’m taking your new minivan to drive the kids over to the hotel for the night. The boys all need new clothes anyway, so they can get by with what I can grab for tonight from the shops in the hotel. I’m pretty sure that Ellen has at least two days of clothes and at least one bathing suit in her backpack. Since your neighbors didn’t call the police or either of you, I will assume they didn’t care one bit when a swarm of people descended on your old house. They had it cleaned out before I seated us. The mattresses and box springs were all taken to the dump. You can take it up with me, but I had them take that disgusting couch bed there as well. I won’t subject anyone to that horror again. Everyone has a bedroom now, and you have a suite at the other end of the house. The main level had four bedrooms, but two went taken to make you each a real office, so no more cardboard boxes and milk crates in the corner of the den. I just got Olive new clothes, and the boys will get them tomorrow, so all their worn-out, thrice-patched stuff are going to some fifth-world, just discovered remote tribe that has never worn clothes.”

I told my aunt that she would find all new underwear that was her size and fit her body type. Both had their work clothes brought over, but each had half of their walk-in closets full of new clothes for work and play. My uncle was on his own for his underwear as that is just a thing guys get for themselves. He had what was at their old house for now.