Home in Time for Dinner

Chris Ramsay is living a normal, quiet - if rather tightly controlled -existence in a quiet suburb in Dallas, Texas. He lives with his father, who’s the one doing the controlling. Shopping every Friday for the next week’s meals, with Chris as the cook. A home with bare walls, no family photos. Predictable routines, including Chris’s tryouts for the baseball team -- which he has just flubbed and fears telling his father about.

Then, one evening, his father out for a meeting, Chris turns on the TV a short while before his favourite program and finds himself watching one of those “true story” shows his father detests for some reason.

There, suddenly, he sees a photo of a little kid on Santa’s knee, a little kid who’s missing and whose computer-aged face is an exact duplicate of Chris’s. A kid stolen from his mother 13 years ago, a kid who has disappeared from his home in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

The body of the story traces Chris’s journey home to Kingston, home to find the mother who is still alive -- not dead as his father has always told him. Travelling by bus, meeting strangers, assuming a new identity to escape detection by his father, grabbing opportunities as they are available, Chris makes his way home. And when he finds himself almost there, it’s not over.