SPN FIC - For Molly, You Do (part 3 of 3)
Part 1 is here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/14832.html#cutid1
Part 2 is here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/14914.html#cutid1
And this is part 3 (the conclusion):
For Molly, You Do
By Carol Davis
(Conclusion)
Instead, after a while, she said, “Do you remember your grandfather?”
Dean shook his head.
She tapped his shoulder to make him look, then nodded toward the house next door, the one his grandparents had lived in. “It was after his accident. He was in a car accident, you know. Damaged his hip somehow so he couldn’t work. Or at least he said he couldn’t. I came out here one afternoon to do something - I don’t remember what - and your dad was up on a ladder, painting the house. I think he was trying to work quickly, so he could finish before it got dark. And your grandfather came out and stood there looking at him and said, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Look at the Christly godawful mess you’re making, you idiot.’”
Dean blinked at her.
“I think he ranted at your father for the best part of half an hour. He was still doing it when Robert - my husband - got home from work. He had to go over there and ask Jack - your grandfather - to calm down, right now, because our daughter was in the house and he ought to remember how to be civilized.”
“What did he say?”
“It involved several more uses of the F-bomb.”
“And…my dad?”
“He just kept painting. He joined the Marines, you know, to get away from Jack. And your grandmother…it sounds unkind, but Robert and I used to say she died to get away from Jack.”
“It’s not unkind if he was an asshole.”
Molly smiled fleetingly. “He was that.”
Dean scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. “My dad won’t talk about him.”
“Not surprising.”
“Was my grandmother nice?”
“She was very quiet. But yes. Mostly.” Molly paused for a moment, then said, “So…fair is fair. I told you a story. Now: what did you do? To deserve the time-out?”
“Nothin’,” Dean muttered.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire.” When Dean didn’t respond, she pulled her own knees up and wrapped her arms around them. She sat there silently for a minute, face tipped into the sun. “Robert was better at dealing with the histrionics when Elizabeth went through it. He called her Lippy McBitch, valedictorian of the drama class of ’78.”
“He called your daughter a bitch?”
“Not to her face. Well, all right, a couple of times he did.”
“He died?”
“He did. Eight months ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am too.”
Dean rubbed at the back of his neck, then wiped his eyes again. “I didn’t…I mean, I kinda…I just wanted…” He cut himself off, then sputtered, “I wanted to stay in one place.”
“And there was a girl involved?”
“Uh…”
“I have psychic powers,” Molly said. “Was she the right girl?”
“Yeah,” Dean told her. Then said, “No. I guess. Older than me.”
“And there was sex involved?”
Dean made a face.
Molly said again, “Psychic powers. What do you like on your pizza?”
“Is my dad coming back?”
“What do you think?” Molly asked.
October 2001
“Let’s get out of here, man. Go for a ride.”
“I can’t.,” Sam said. “I told Molly I’d dustmop.”
Dean scrunched up his face. “You told her you’d what?”
Without bothering to answer him, Sam disappeared around the corner into the pantry. He came back out carrying a broomhandle with a weird collection of strings connected to one end.
“What the hell’s that thing?” Dean demanded.
“It’s a dustmop.”
“She’s turning you into a girl, man. Do you pee sitting down now?”
“Jesus, Dean. Be like that.”
“Like what?”
In full-out bitch mode Sam starting pushing the stringy thing around the floor, underneath the furniture, along the edges of the woodwork. He wasn’t coming up with any dust, because there wasn’t any dust to come up with.
“We’re going up to Michigan,” Dean said after a while.
“Swell.”
“Gonna be gone a couple weeks, probably.”
“Whatever.”
“Come on, man, could you talk to me?”
“About what?” Sam stopped mopping and glowered. “I’m not going with you. You know that. Molly needs help around the house, and I need a place to stay. One place. So I can finish out the year and take my exams and not have to try to study while you’ve got the TV blaring two feet from my head. Why do you want to act like you didn’t hear any of this two months ago?”
Dean shrugged mildly and leaned back against the edge of the dining room table, arms folded across his chest. “You could bag it.”
“What? High school?”
“I did.”
Sam’s expression shifted a couple of times, then he took his dustmop and disappeared again into the kitchen. This time he didn’t come back out, so Dean trailed him in there.
“Did he put you up to this?” Sam demanded.
“Who?”
“What, who? Dad.”
“No, man. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
“I’m not gonna bag high school, Dean. I want to graduate.”
“And then what?”
“College. Did you not -“
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Two months ago. For what? No degree necessary, Sammy. We’re hunters, remember?”
“Not me,” Sam said.
“What?”
“I said, not me. I’ve had enough of it, Dean. And I told you that two months ago, too. Do you ever listen to anything I say?”
“When it makes sense I do.”
“And you get to decide whether it makes sense or not. Well, not this time. It’s my life and my future, and I’m the one who gets to decide. It’s important to me. I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life wandering around the country like some gypsy. I want a home and a job and a family. I said that two months ago.” His point made, Sam went into the pantry and came out with a spray bottle of kitchen-and-bath cleaner and a roll of paper towels. “I get that you want to do what Dad does,” he went on as he spritzed cleanser onto a countertop. “That’s okay, if it’s what you want. But I’m not a hunter. Never have been.”
Dean snorted softly. “So that wasn’t you that bagged that” - he dropped his voice - “gremlin back in Mayville?”
“I was helping out. Like I’m helping out here. This” - Sam gestured with his fistful of paper towels - “doesn’t mean I want to clean kitchens for a living.”
“I hope the hell not.”
“Could you just bite me?”
“Do you know how freakin’ ridiculous you look? You’re doing everything but wearing a fucking apron, man.”
“What if I do?”
“You wear an apron?” Dean shrilled. “I don’t even know you.”
To Dean’s astonishment Sam dropped the towels and then dropped his jeans and his shorts, right there in the middle of the kitchen. “See?” he demanded. “It’s still there.”
“Jesus, Sam.”
“Sam?” Molly’s voice said from the dining room. “Put your pants back on. I have people coming over.”
Sam’s face contorted into the See What You Made Me Do??? expression Dean had seen so many times he could have painted it in oils. Pulling his jeans back up took more effort, and more fumbling, than dropping them had. “Look,” he said, his face still a pleasant shade of tomato. “I get where you’re coming from. At least I guess I do. The whole thing - it’s just what we’ve always done. And that’s fine, if that’s what works for you. But I want something different. And you know, man, I’m entitled to make my own choices.”
“Whatever,” Dean told him.
“You could come.”
“Where? To college? What do I want with that?”
“An education?”
“Sam.”
“Go back to Dad, if you’re just gonna stand here and do this. Okay? We went through all this. If you want to be an amnesia victim, fine, but do it somewhere else.”
Dean stood there, silent, hands shoved into his pockets.
“Just go,” Sam said.
He went as far as the front steps. Then energy ran out of him like rain off the end of a downspout and he sank down onto a step. The car he had borrowed from Bobby Singer sat directly in front of him at the curb, its rusty patches almost glowing in the autumn sunlight.
There was a garage a few blocks down the street - he’d stopped there on the way to Molly’s, to fill the tank in Bobby’s old shitbucket of a car. They had a printed-up HELP WANTED sign taped to the window and he stared at it the whole time he had the pump nozzle in his hand. They probably wanted a pump jockey, or maybe somebody to run the register, maybe a combination of both. Somebody to do the little crap jobs.
Sam was gonna be here the whole school year, unless Molly decided she wanted her privacy back and booted him out. Or unless Dad changed his mind and told Sam to get back in the car and drop all the college talk.
Sam was gonna be here. Here, and not on the road with them.
“Dean?”
He glanced at Molly as she sat down beside him. She’d lost weight since the last time he saw her. Looked a little too thin. A little pale. Yeah, she needed Sam’s help. Needed somebody to be around.
She had three bedrooms upstairs. Hers, Sam’s, and that other one, the one that used to have the baby stuff in it.
So what if there was a pink frilly thing on the daybed.
She didn’t say anything. Didn’t say, “You should let him make his own decision.” Didn’t say, “He deserves the chance to be something special.” Or, “Have you seen his grades?”
He’d seen Sam’s grades. Straight-freaking-A’s.
How Sam had managed that, Dean didn’t have a clue. Maybe he’d made a deal with somebody. Something. A little midnight mojo, some charms and chanting.
Aw, hell. Sam had a brain.
“There’s pot roast,” Molly offered.
Dean peered at her wearily. “Thought you were having people over.”
“I am.”
“I’m not much on the whole dinner-party thing.”
She rested a hand on his back, ran it up and down his spine. She knew where he was coming from, he supposed. Sort of, at least. Her daughter had moved out, gotten married, lived several states away. And her husband had died. She’d been on her own for quite a while before Sam showed up to do her dustmopping. But she had a house. And friends. A lady like that, she had to have friends. Had people coming over.
All he had was that piece of crap car, and even that was a loaner.
“Is there pie?” he asked.
“If you want.”
“You don’t make him wear an apron, do you?”
“It’s pink and has kittens on it.”
Dean snorted softly.
“He misses you.”
“Yeah, judging from all the phone calls he doesn’t make.”
“They go,” Molly said. “They go, and you wonder how in the world you can fill up your life. You wonder how you can live.”
“I like pie,” Dean said.
In the morning, when he drove silently back to Colorado, back to Dad, there was a slab of apple pie covered in plastic wrap on the seat beside him.
April 2006
A girl with dark hair opened the door when Sam rang the bell. To Dean’s surprise, she and Sam immediately wrapped their arms around each other and gave each other a kiss on the cheek. They stood there like conjoined twins for a minute, then the girl let go and stepped back so Sam could go on inside. Following a step behind, Dean hissed at his brother, “Who’s -?”
“Julie,” Sam whispered back.
There was no point in all the whispering, because she was standing right there. “I’m Julie,” she said to Dean.
“Molly’s granddaughter,” Sam said. “She’s the one who called.”
Dean looked around as they got past the threshold. The house looked the same as the last time he’d seen it, which was no surprise; at a certain point old people’s houses seemed to get stuck in time, never changing, just developing a weird little coating of dust that always made him think of the ashes to ashes, dust to dust thing. One thing was different, though: in place of the landscape that used to hang over the TV was a studio portrait of a middle-aged couple standing on either side of a dark-haired girl. Molly’s daughter Elizabeth, her husband, and Julie.
Who was…well…
“Dean,” Sam said.
Ridiculously smoking hot. With eyes you could fall into and drown, and die a happy man.
“Dean,” Sam said again, almost politely. He was leaving out the “Jesus” part of “Jesus, Dean,” and of course he was being polite because of where they were and why they were there.
Dean took another step and closed the door behind him, relieving Julie of that responsibility. Smoking-hot Julie, who had just had the clutch on his brother.
“She’s awake,” Julie told them. “You can go up if you like.”
There had been no suggestion from either one of them during the seven hours it had taken to get here that maybe it would be a better idea not to come. No thought that Elizabeth and her husband and Julie were the only people Molly really needed nearby right now, that the Winchesters could beg off and nobody would mind.
But now that they were here…
“Is she…” Dean began, and couldn’t finish the question.
“She’s comfortable,” Julie said.
He let Sam go up first, because Sam had lived here for all those months. And Sam knew Julie. Sam really knew Julie.
The thought made him chuckle, in spite of why they were here. Ah, Sammy. And I thought you were dustmopping.
Julie brought him a glass of water he hadn’t asked for and he gulped it down in three swallows. The house seemed warmer than normal, was warmer than normal judging by the thin blouse Julie had on, too skimpy for a day in the low sixties. Dean sat on the couch with the empty glass and started rolling it between his palms.
“Your parents here?” he asked after a minute.
“They’re in town.”
Something drifted into his mind. “She -“
“What?”
“Long time ago. She wished that you’d have a brother. That didn’t happen, huh?”
Julie frowned, then let the weirdness of that go by. “No.”
You can’t have mine, he thought, and that didn’t quite make sense.
“It’s not going to be anytime soon,” Julie said distractedly, then looked him in the eye. “I mean, not today or tomorrow. The doctor said it might be a few more weeks. But she wanted to see you before…you know. Before she’s not able to talk, or respond.” Tears started to roll down her cheeks, and she scrubbed them away with the back of her hand. “I’m glad you could come. She really wanted to see you.”
“Sam,” Dean guessed.
“No. Well, both of you. But she asked for you.”
“Wha…why?”
“I guess you should ask her.”
Sam wasn’t upstairs very long. He was all emo again when he came down, which made Dean want to bolt out the front door, scramble into the car and hit the road. “She wants to see you,” Sam said. Dean nodded at that, a single dip of his head. He stayed glued to the couch, though, and kept rolling the glass until Julie took it away from him.
When she disappeared into the kitchen, Sam said quietly, “She looks okay. Tired. Just…really tired.”
“Okay,” Dean said.
“Really, man. She wants to see you.”
Sam was a lying bastard, Dean thought when he reached Molly’s bedroom doorway. She didn’t look tired.
“Dean,” she said, and stretched a hand toward him.
I don’t like sick people, he thought. I don’t like hospitals and I don’t like people laying in bed all propped up like that, and I really freaking don’t like dying people.
His face contorted. There was no way he could put together a smile.
She beckoned to him. “So…what did you think of Julie?”
Damned if she wasn’t smirking at him. You’re trying to pimp out your granddaughter? he thought incredulously. “Uh…” he stammered.
So she could still make jokes.
“Pull up a chair,” she said. “Set a spell.”
Sam had already pulled up the chair. Or maybe it’d been there beside the bed when Sam came up here. Dean managed to put one foot in front of the other to reach it and sank onto it like it was the Chair of Doom outside the principal’s office. “We can’t find my dad,” he said for no reason he could think of.
“But you found each other.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good. That’s what you wanted.”
Dean grimaced. “Not what Sam wanted. He -“
“He told me.”
“About his girlfriend?”
“That too.” Molly’s gaze shifted to the small table in front of the windows that looked out onto the street in front of the house. “There’s an envelope there. Grab it, would you?” When he brought it to her she unfastened the clasp that held it shut and peered into it as if she’d forgotten what was inside. After a moment she pulled out a handful of pictures that she held out to Dean. “Your dad and your grandmother. Julie found them when she helped me sort out some of my things.”
Dad, lanky, slender, frowning in one picture, trying to smile in another. And Dad’s mom, who’d died before Dean was born. “Thank you,” Dean murmured.
Molly folded the flap down and held out the envelope. “For you and Sam.”
“What -?“
“Julie had some trouble tracking you down. She said you’ve changed phone numbers. She had to find Sam through a friend from Stanford. We thought maybe…after…there might be problems again. Finding you. So we’ll do this now.”
Puzzled, Dean opened the envelope and peered inside. “I - we can’t take this.”
“Trust me. Elizabeth and Ken are very well off. Julie gets the house and all the rest of it. That’s just something for you and Sam.”
“There’s like - there’s a lot of money here.”
“Not that much.”
“Molly…”
That made her smile wistfully. “You know, you’ve never called me by my name. I figured you thought of me as ‘that old lady.’”
“No,” Dean said.
“You sure?”
His throat closed as efficiently as if someone had wrapped a hand around it and squeezed. He had to settle for a nod.
“You’re still driving your dad’s car.”
Dean’s head wobbled. “He gave it to me.”
“I think he gave you more than you know, sweetie.”
“I can’t take your money.”
“Can’t take it with me, Dean.”
He had to get up from the chair and turn away. He was still holding the envelope in both hands as he went to the window and looked out at the street, at the Impala. She couldn’t see his face that way, but she could see his shoulders shake.
“Dean?”
It took as much effort as he had ever mustered to turn around. She beckoned to him again, pretended she couldn’t reach something on her night table. When he got close enough she reached up and touched a fingertip to his cheek.
“If there’s more than one, it’s not magic,” she told him.
Then she said, “Julie made pie.”
His lips formed the word, “Can’t…”
“Sweetie.”
Someone came up behind him and grasped his arm. He expected Sam, but it was Julie. “Sam’s waiting for you downstairs,” she offered.
“Can’t,” he said.
Can’t stay? Can’t eat? He didn’t elaborate, but they both seemed to understand: grandmother and granddaughter. Julie’s grasp on his arm tightened for a moment before she let him go. If Julie hadn’t managed to find Sam through somebody at Stanford - probably one of those people Sam insisted on e‑mailing all the time - then they would have gotten a different message somewhere along the line. She’s gone. Stop by Topeka if you want to visit a big shiny hunk of granite.
The pictures were wrinkling a little in his hand. He glanced down at them, thinking, When was that? When Dad was this kid?
“We’ll…” he stammered. “There’s a motel. Down the street.”
“That one’s terrible,” Julie told him. “I can -“
He ignored her and looked at Molly. “Tell me about my dad. Please.”
And he sat back down on the chair.
Part 2 is here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/14914.html#cutid1
And this is part 3 (the conclusion):
For Molly, You Do
By Carol Davis
(Conclusion)
Instead, after a while, she said, “Do you remember your grandfather?”
Dean shook his head.
She tapped his shoulder to make him look, then nodded toward the house next door, the one his grandparents had lived in. “It was after his accident. He was in a car accident, you know. Damaged his hip somehow so he couldn’t work. Or at least he said he couldn’t. I came out here one afternoon to do something - I don’t remember what - and your dad was up on a ladder, painting the house. I think he was trying to work quickly, so he could finish before it got dark. And your grandfather came out and stood there looking at him and said, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Look at the Christly godawful mess you’re making, you idiot.’”
Dean blinked at her.
“I think he ranted at your father for the best part of half an hour. He was still doing it when Robert - my husband - got home from work. He had to go over there and ask Jack - your grandfather - to calm down, right now, because our daughter was in the house and he ought to remember how to be civilized.”
“What did he say?”
“It involved several more uses of the F-bomb.”
“And…my dad?”
“He just kept painting. He joined the Marines, you know, to get away from Jack. And your grandmother…it sounds unkind, but Robert and I used to say she died to get away from Jack.”
“It’s not unkind if he was an asshole.”
Molly smiled fleetingly. “He was that.”
Dean scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. “My dad won’t talk about him.”
“Not surprising.”
“Was my grandmother nice?”
“She was very quiet. But yes. Mostly.” Molly paused for a moment, then said, “So…fair is fair. I told you a story. Now: what did you do? To deserve the time-out?”
“Nothin’,” Dean muttered.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire.” When Dean didn’t respond, she pulled her own knees up and wrapped her arms around them. She sat there silently for a minute, face tipped into the sun. “Robert was better at dealing with the histrionics when Elizabeth went through it. He called her Lippy McBitch, valedictorian of the drama class of ’78.”
“He called your daughter a bitch?”
“Not to her face. Well, all right, a couple of times he did.”
“He died?”
“He did. Eight months ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am too.”
Dean rubbed at the back of his neck, then wiped his eyes again. “I didn’t…I mean, I kinda…I just wanted…” He cut himself off, then sputtered, “I wanted to stay in one place.”
“And there was a girl involved?”
“Uh…”
“I have psychic powers,” Molly said. “Was she the right girl?”
“Yeah,” Dean told her. Then said, “No. I guess. Older than me.”
“And there was sex involved?”
Dean made a face.
Molly said again, “Psychic powers. What do you like on your pizza?”
“Is my dad coming back?”
“What do you think?” Molly asked.
October 2001
“Let’s get out of here, man. Go for a ride.”
“I can’t.,” Sam said. “I told Molly I’d dustmop.”
Dean scrunched up his face. “You told her you’d what?”
Without bothering to answer him, Sam disappeared around the corner into the pantry. He came back out carrying a broomhandle with a weird collection of strings connected to one end.
“What the hell’s that thing?” Dean demanded.
“It’s a dustmop.”
“She’s turning you into a girl, man. Do you pee sitting down now?”
“Jesus, Dean. Be like that.”
“Like what?”
In full-out bitch mode Sam starting pushing the stringy thing around the floor, underneath the furniture, along the edges of the woodwork. He wasn’t coming up with any dust, because there wasn’t any dust to come up with.
“We’re going up to Michigan,” Dean said after a while.
“Swell.”
“Gonna be gone a couple weeks, probably.”
“Whatever.”
“Come on, man, could you talk to me?”
“About what?” Sam stopped mopping and glowered. “I’m not going with you. You know that. Molly needs help around the house, and I need a place to stay. One place. So I can finish out the year and take my exams and not have to try to study while you’ve got the TV blaring two feet from my head. Why do you want to act like you didn’t hear any of this two months ago?”
Dean shrugged mildly and leaned back against the edge of the dining room table, arms folded across his chest. “You could bag it.”
“What? High school?”
“I did.”
Sam’s expression shifted a couple of times, then he took his dustmop and disappeared again into the kitchen. This time he didn’t come back out, so Dean trailed him in there.
“Did he put you up to this?” Sam demanded.
“Who?”
“What, who? Dad.”
“No, man. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
“I’m not gonna bag high school, Dean. I want to graduate.”
“And then what?”
“College. Did you not -“
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Two months ago. For what? No degree necessary, Sammy. We’re hunters, remember?”
“Not me,” Sam said.
“What?”
“I said, not me. I’ve had enough of it, Dean. And I told you that two months ago, too. Do you ever listen to anything I say?”
“When it makes sense I do.”
“And you get to decide whether it makes sense or not. Well, not this time. It’s my life and my future, and I’m the one who gets to decide. It’s important to me. I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life wandering around the country like some gypsy. I want a home and a job and a family. I said that two months ago.” His point made, Sam went into the pantry and came out with a spray bottle of kitchen-and-bath cleaner and a roll of paper towels. “I get that you want to do what Dad does,” he went on as he spritzed cleanser onto a countertop. “That’s okay, if it’s what you want. But I’m not a hunter. Never have been.”
Dean snorted softly. “So that wasn’t you that bagged that” - he dropped his voice - “gremlin back in Mayville?”
“I was helping out. Like I’m helping out here. This” - Sam gestured with his fistful of paper towels - “doesn’t mean I want to clean kitchens for a living.”
“I hope the hell not.”
“Could you just bite me?”
“Do you know how freakin’ ridiculous you look? You’re doing everything but wearing a fucking apron, man.”
“What if I do?”
“You wear an apron?” Dean shrilled. “I don’t even know you.”
To Dean’s astonishment Sam dropped the towels and then dropped his jeans and his shorts, right there in the middle of the kitchen. “See?” he demanded. “It’s still there.”
“Jesus, Sam.”
“Sam?” Molly’s voice said from the dining room. “Put your pants back on. I have people coming over.”
Sam’s face contorted into the See What You Made Me Do??? expression Dean had seen so many times he could have painted it in oils. Pulling his jeans back up took more effort, and more fumbling, than dropping them had. “Look,” he said, his face still a pleasant shade of tomato. “I get where you’re coming from. At least I guess I do. The whole thing - it’s just what we’ve always done. And that’s fine, if that’s what works for you. But I want something different. And you know, man, I’m entitled to make my own choices.”
“Whatever,” Dean told him.
“You could come.”
“Where? To college? What do I want with that?”
“An education?”
“Sam.”
“Go back to Dad, if you’re just gonna stand here and do this. Okay? We went through all this. If you want to be an amnesia victim, fine, but do it somewhere else.”
Dean stood there, silent, hands shoved into his pockets.
“Just go,” Sam said.
He went as far as the front steps. Then energy ran out of him like rain off the end of a downspout and he sank down onto a step. The car he had borrowed from Bobby Singer sat directly in front of him at the curb, its rusty patches almost glowing in the autumn sunlight.
There was a garage a few blocks down the street - he’d stopped there on the way to Molly’s, to fill the tank in Bobby’s old shitbucket of a car. They had a printed-up HELP WANTED sign taped to the window and he stared at it the whole time he had the pump nozzle in his hand. They probably wanted a pump jockey, or maybe somebody to run the register, maybe a combination of both. Somebody to do the little crap jobs.
Sam was gonna be here the whole school year, unless Molly decided she wanted her privacy back and booted him out. Or unless Dad changed his mind and told Sam to get back in the car and drop all the college talk.
Sam was gonna be here. Here, and not on the road with them.
“Dean?”
He glanced at Molly as she sat down beside him. She’d lost weight since the last time he saw her. Looked a little too thin. A little pale. Yeah, she needed Sam’s help. Needed somebody to be around.
She had three bedrooms upstairs. Hers, Sam’s, and that other one, the one that used to have the baby stuff in it.
So what if there was a pink frilly thing on the daybed.
She didn’t say anything. Didn’t say, “You should let him make his own decision.” Didn’t say, “He deserves the chance to be something special.” Or, “Have you seen his grades?”
He’d seen Sam’s grades. Straight-freaking-A’s.
How Sam had managed that, Dean didn’t have a clue. Maybe he’d made a deal with somebody. Something. A little midnight mojo, some charms and chanting.
Aw, hell. Sam had a brain.
“There’s pot roast,” Molly offered.
Dean peered at her wearily. “Thought you were having people over.”
“I am.”
“I’m not much on the whole dinner-party thing.”
She rested a hand on his back, ran it up and down his spine. She knew where he was coming from, he supposed. Sort of, at least. Her daughter had moved out, gotten married, lived several states away. And her husband had died. She’d been on her own for quite a while before Sam showed up to do her dustmopping. But she had a house. And friends. A lady like that, she had to have friends. Had people coming over.
All he had was that piece of crap car, and even that was a loaner.
“Is there pie?” he asked.
“If you want.”
“You don’t make him wear an apron, do you?”
“It’s pink and has kittens on it.”
Dean snorted softly.
“He misses you.”
“Yeah, judging from all the phone calls he doesn’t make.”
“They go,” Molly said. “They go, and you wonder how in the world you can fill up your life. You wonder how you can live.”
“I like pie,” Dean said.
In the morning, when he drove silently back to Colorado, back to Dad, there was a slab of apple pie covered in plastic wrap on the seat beside him.
April 2006
A girl with dark hair opened the door when Sam rang the bell. To Dean’s surprise, she and Sam immediately wrapped their arms around each other and gave each other a kiss on the cheek. They stood there like conjoined twins for a minute, then the girl let go and stepped back so Sam could go on inside. Following a step behind, Dean hissed at his brother, “Who’s -?”
“Julie,” Sam whispered back.
There was no point in all the whispering, because she was standing right there. “I’m Julie,” she said to Dean.
“Molly’s granddaughter,” Sam said. “She’s the one who called.”
Dean looked around as they got past the threshold. The house looked the same as the last time he’d seen it, which was no surprise; at a certain point old people’s houses seemed to get stuck in time, never changing, just developing a weird little coating of dust that always made him think of the ashes to ashes, dust to dust thing. One thing was different, though: in place of the landscape that used to hang over the TV was a studio portrait of a middle-aged couple standing on either side of a dark-haired girl. Molly’s daughter Elizabeth, her husband, and Julie.
Who was…well…
“Dean,” Sam said.
Ridiculously smoking hot. With eyes you could fall into and drown, and die a happy man.
“Dean,” Sam said again, almost politely. He was leaving out the “Jesus” part of “Jesus, Dean,” and of course he was being polite because of where they were and why they were there.
Dean took another step and closed the door behind him, relieving Julie of that responsibility. Smoking-hot Julie, who had just had the clutch on his brother.
“She’s awake,” Julie told them. “You can go up if you like.”
There had been no suggestion from either one of them during the seven hours it had taken to get here that maybe it would be a better idea not to come. No thought that Elizabeth and her husband and Julie were the only people Molly really needed nearby right now, that the Winchesters could beg off and nobody would mind.
But now that they were here…
“Is she…” Dean began, and couldn’t finish the question.
“She’s comfortable,” Julie said.
He let Sam go up first, because Sam had lived here for all those months. And Sam knew Julie. Sam really knew Julie.
The thought made him chuckle, in spite of why they were here. Ah, Sammy. And I thought you were dustmopping.
Julie brought him a glass of water he hadn’t asked for and he gulped it down in three swallows. The house seemed warmer than normal, was warmer than normal judging by the thin blouse Julie had on, too skimpy for a day in the low sixties. Dean sat on the couch with the empty glass and started rolling it between his palms.
“Your parents here?” he asked after a minute.
“They’re in town.”
Something drifted into his mind. “She -“
“What?”
“Long time ago. She wished that you’d have a brother. That didn’t happen, huh?”
Julie frowned, then let the weirdness of that go by. “No.”
You can’t have mine, he thought, and that didn’t quite make sense.
“It’s not going to be anytime soon,” Julie said distractedly, then looked him in the eye. “I mean, not today or tomorrow. The doctor said it might be a few more weeks. But she wanted to see you before…you know. Before she’s not able to talk, or respond.” Tears started to roll down her cheeks, and she scrubbed them away with the back of her hand. “I’m glad you could come. She really wanted to see you.”
“Sam,” Dean guessed.
“No. Well, both of you. But she asked for you.”
“Wha…why?”
“I guess you should ask her.”
Sam wasn’t upstairs very long. He was all emo again when he came down, which made Dean want to bolt out the front door, scramble into the car and hit the road. “She wants to see you,” Sam said. Dean nodded at that, a single dip of his head. He stayed glued to the couch, though, and kept rolling the glass until Julie took it away from him.
When she disappeared into the kitchen, Sam said quietly, “She looks okay. Tired. Just…really tired.”
“Okay,” Dean said.
“Really, man. She wants to see you.”
Sam was a lying bastard, Dean thought when he reached Molly’s bedroom doorway. She didn’t look tired.
“Dean,” she said, and stretched a hand toward him.
I don’t like sick people, he thought. I don’t like hospitals and I don’t like people laying in bed all propped up like that, and I really freaking don’t like dying people.
His face contorted. There was no way he could put together a smile.
She beckoned to him. “So…what did you think of Julie?”
Damned if she wasn’t smirking at him. You’re trying to pimp out your granddaughter? he thought incredulously. “Uh…” he stammered.
So she could still make jokes.
“Pull up a chair,” she said. “Set a spell.”
Sam had already pulled up the chair. Or maybe it’d been there beside the bed when Sam came up here. Dean managed to put one foot in front of the other to reach it and sank onto it like it was the Chair of Doom outside the principal’s office. “We can’t find my dad,” he said for no reason he could think of.
“But you found each other.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good. That’s what you wanted.”
Dean grimaced. “Not what Sam wanted. He -“
“He told me.”
“About his girlfriend?”
“That too.” Molly’s gaze shifted to the small table in front of the windows that looked out onto the street in front of the house. “There’s an envelope there. Grab it, would you?” When he brought it to her she unfastened the clasp that held it shut and peered into it as if she’d forgotten what was inside. After a moment she pulled out a handful of pictures that she held out to Dean. “Your dad and your grandmother. Julie found them when she helped me sort out some of my things.”
Dad, lanky, slender, frowning in one picture, trying to smile in another. And Dad’s mom, who’d died before Dean was born. “Thank you,” Dean murmured.
Molly folded the flap down and held out the envelope. “For you and Sam.”
“What -?“
“Julie had some trouble tracking you down. She said you’ve changed phone numbers. She had to find Sam through a friend from Stanford. We thought maybe…after…there might be problems again. Finding you. So we’ll do this now.”
Puzzled, Dean opened the envelope and peered inside. “I - we can’t take this.”
“Trust me. Elizabeth and Ken are very well off. Julie gets the house and all the rest of it. That’s just something for you and Sam.”
“There’s like - there’s a lot of money here.”
“Not that much.”
“Molly…”
That made her smile wistfully. “You know, you’ve never called me by my name. I figured you thought of me as ‘that old lady.’”
“No,” Dean said.
“You sure?”
His throat closed as efficiently as if someone had wrapped a hand around it and squeezed. He had to settle for a nod.
“You’re still driving your dad’s car.”
Dean’s head wobbled. “He gave it to me.”
“I think he gave you more than you know, sweetie.”
“I can’t take your money.”
“Can’t take it with me, Dean.”
He had to get up from the chair and turn away. He was still holding the envelope in both hands as he went to the window and looked out at the street, at the Impala. She couldn’t see his face that way, but she could see his shoulders shake.
“Dean?”
It took as much effort as he had ever mustered to turn around. She beckoned to him again, pretended she couldn’t reach something on her night table. When he got close enough she reached up and touched a fingertip to his cheek.
“If there’s more than one, it’s not magic,” she told him.
Then she said, “Julie made pie.”
His lips formed the word, “Can’t…”
“Sweetie.”
Someone came up behind him and grasped his arm. He expected Sam, but it was Julie. “Sam’s waiting for you downstairs,” she offered.
“Can’t,” he said.
Can’t stay? Can’t eat? He didn’t elaborate, but they both seemed to understand: grandmother and granddaughter. Julie’s grasp on his arm tightened for a moment before she let him go. If Julie hadn’t managed to find Sam through somebody at Stanford - probably one of those people Sam insisted on e‑mailing all the time - then they would have gotten a different message somewhere along the line. She’s gone. Stop by Topeka if you want to visit a big shiny hunk of granite.
The pictures were wrinkling a little in his hand. He glanced down at them, thinking, When was that? When Dad was this kid?
“We’ll…” he stammered. “There’s a motel. Down the street.”
“That one’s terrible,” Julie told him. “I can -“
He ignored her and looked at Molly. “Tell me about my dad. Please.”
And he sat back down on the chair.