Lineage - Chapter Three - Part Two
Author's Note: I promise, I WILL do humor once more. Just...not right now.
It wasn’t really a fight per se, more just a passive-aggressive series of attacks between father and daughter. But between the two of them, that’s pretty much how fights went.
Sam and Sarah would silently glare at each other. Sarah and Maya would serve up dual silent treatments. Sam and Maya would scream and yell and pound on walls until the house shook. Even Sarah and Rachel had their own method of fighting - blithe and asinine quips shot back and forth, rapid fire. But when Rache had a beef with her father, or if Sam had one with her, that passive-aggressive Winchester hostility always took over.
She’s twenty-years-old now, not quite old enough to drink legally, but hey, they’re family and it’s a holiday. So no one objected when she poured herself some wine. Or when she grabbed a beer from the fridge. Or another. No one told her to stop once her attitude began to shift, cruel jibes flowing from a newly brazen mouth.
By the time Dean finds her, bundled up out in the cold, empty bottle dangling perilously from her fingertips, all he can think is Thank God there wasn’t egg nog. That shit is just as nasty coming up as it is going down. And there’s not a doubt in his mind, seeing her now, that something’s gonna come up at some point tonight.
“There you are,” he says simply, trying not to snicker at the drunken, wobbly double take she does. He sits down next to her on the cold wooden bench, lets his gaze falter out to the dark trees and grass beyond, the wide private yard where his kids used to play.
“Here I am,” she says slow and measured after too long a pause.
She slumps back into her seat and he turns to see her. “Been looking for you,” he says, before leaning back himself. “Kind of cold out here.”
She shrugs, barely perceptible beneath her heavy coat and scarf, and then turns to glare at her uncle. “I wanted to be alone.”
“Yeah,” he grins, noticing how similar her expression right now is to the one he had so cleverly labeled as drunken, pissy Sammy some thirty years before. “I kinda figured that. But, you know, it’s Christmas Eve, I figured your parents might get a little pissed if I let you freeze to death out here.”
She turns away, eyes out to the lawn, when she says, voice suddenly harsh and deep, “I doubt it.”
Which wipes the smile clean off Dean’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shrugs again, lazy and jagged, and lets out a sigh. “What would it matter?” drips slow and sincere from her chapped lips.
“Hey,” he barks, straightening up and turning towards her. “Don’t say shit like that.” She looks at him as though through a thick haze before quirking a corner of her mouth up in a seemingly coy grin, an I’m only kidding sort of smirk. “Your parents love you,” he says absently, almost as though rehearsed. “They’d care if you froze,” he ends with a light note to his voice, downplaying the fact that he can see in her eyes that she was serious to begin with.
She scoffs loudly, almost guttural, turns away with her lips set once more in a firm line. “They don’t even know how to care anymore.”
She’s been drinking for hours, maybe on and off all day, for all he knows. But he’s only had a couple of beers, no where near drunk enough to be having this conversation. And he almost says so, almost tells her, look, I can’t do this right now, today’s been hard enough already, tomorrow’ll probably be worse. But all that comes out is, “Rache,” a mournful sigh.
“They don’t even love each other anymore,” she almost slurs.
“That’s not true,” he counters, thinking, for the first time in a long time, that’s she’s too immature to understand.
“Last couple of days he’s been sleeping in their room. But it’s all a show, all for me. I know he hasn’t been in there in a long time.”
And Dean can’t help the, “What?” that slips past his tongue. Because, obviously, things had been tense around here, communication clearly lacking between the two, but… “How do you know?”
She glances up at him quickly, odd glare on her face as though she’d forgotten he was still there, didn’t think he’d been listening, and doesn’t now want to be bothered with his foolish questions. “He changed her sheets,” she says plainly, looking away. “Her bed, it doesn’t smell like Maya anymore. It smells like him.”
He takes a deep breath, tries to explain something he himself doesn’t fully understand. “They still love each other,” he says finally. “It’s just…this is a though time for them.”
“For them,” she repeats, venom to her voice, a statement and a question all in one.
“For all of us,” he corrects. “But you gotta understand,” he begins again, wondering if there’s any way to explain how fundamentally different it is to lose a child, how earth-shattering and all encompassing that sort of grief can be. “They’re all alone here, Rache. It’s just…hard.”
“I’m all alone there,” she counters, no emotion behind her words.
His hand instinctively falls to her back. “I know kid.”
But if she notices it doesn’t show, newfound words spilling from her despite his attempt at comfort. “Dad always understood her,” she says, tone too contemplative for someone sitting drunken in the cold. “More than anybody.”
“They’re a lot alike,” he murmurs absently.
“She’d do stuff…like, just flip a switch or something,” she tries to explain, “go…moody. She could be a real bitch, you know?”
He laughs under his breath, gives a slight nod. “Yeah, I know.”
“But he always knew…if something was really bugging her.” She shifts in her seat, turns to face him with glassy eyes, breath clouding the air between them. “When we were little, Mom used to make her take a nap when she got all grouchy, which never worked. She’d throw a temper tantrum and sit in her bed screaming ‘til Mom was ready to pull her hair out. But Dad, he knew if she was tired and needed a nap. Or frustrated about something. Or bored or just pissed at the world.” She stops just long enough to lock eyes with her uncle. “How’d he always know?”
“I don’t know,” he says, averting her stare. Because he doesn’t want to say something that might hurt her - they were just that close, had that strong a bond. Or something that she wouldn’t be able to understand - sometimes parents just know.
She shrugs her shoulders when he doesn’t go on, lets out a long deflating sigh. “There were times I thought I knew her,” she says, barely a whisper. “Now…”
“Yeah,” Dean comments softly, a simple agreement to an all too complex emotion.
The bitter breeze kicks up a bit, stinging all uncovered flesh. But neither make a move to rise, leave the cold, rejoin their family inside. Because even with hot chocolate and a fire in the fireplace, a smiling and laughing Ava zipping through random bits of gossip and a zonked out Michael on the floor, that place was anything but cozy and comfortable.
When she speaks again, an eerie sort of complement to the slight whistle of the wind, thick and cold silence surrounding it, the words seem sober despite their air of petulance. “Everybody knows she was their favorite. Everybody.”
He turns and stares wide-eyed, open-mouthed, for a long moment before, “Rachel,” falls from his lips in one light breath.
“I’m not jealous or anything,” she utters simply, meeting his stricken gaze. “It just doesn’t seem right is all.” She looks away, back out towards the dark. “She was always so…” she tries, making a tight-lipped, firm fisted gesture before finally finding the right word, “stingy. Like love’s so hard to give. And it just made everybody want it more. You know? Like it means more if you have to work for it.”
He nods, though she’s paying no attention and doesn’t even see. He nods because he’s never really thought of it before, never really realized how true that might be. Maya’d always been the independent one, the one who tried so hard to make it seem as though she never needed anyone for anything. But he’d never thought that in so doing she had been withholding her love.
Until now. Now, he realizes, that deep ache that would rise whenever she turned her back was exactly that, a sense of rejection.
Look at poor Sarah. It was obvious that she and Rachel got along, almost falling into that creepy my mom’s my best friend kind of relationship. They had more in common, shared interests, similar sense of humor, impassioned work ethic. Outwardly, it seemed, and surely anyone would say, that Rachel was her favorite child - if there were such a thing among parents.
But the look of sheer and pure joy, of love, that rose to her features on those rare occasions when Maya called her mommy, leaned into her wholly, trusting, letting Sarah wrap around her until they appeared to be one once more. When she said, hushed, almost secretively, an utterance just for her, “I love you,” that was a look he’d never seen Rachel spark in her mother before.
“I hate that,” she says suddenly, interrupting his thoughts. “I always hated that.” She turns to her uncle, eyes, though barely visible in the dark night, flickering in a dangerous and fiery way. “I hate her.”
Their eyes are locked for one long and knowing moment before he feels his body tense, features stiffen, as the deeply buried truth rolls up on him. “Me too,” he says pointedly.
“How could she do that?” Rachel asks, emotion filling her words.
His voice is level and deep when he responds with, “I don’t know.”
“It’s like she didn’t even care, like she never cared,” she almost sobs.
He nods, rising from the bench, stalking off to the edge of the porch, white-knuckling the rail.
“She was important, you know? She was one of us. And…and…”
“And she threw it all away,” he finishes for his niece. “All of it.”
Rachel straightens up behind him, fabric of her coat rustling against the bench. She snuffles once, swallows hard before saying, deep and controlled, “She never asked for help. We would have helped her. With anything. Why didn’t she ever just ask?”
But the question is unanswerable, even worse than rhetorical. So he says nothing.
She clumsily pulls herself off the bench, only feeling the heaviness of her drunken body once standing, and rubs her mittened hands absently together as she approaches her uncle. He doesn’t turn to look at her, only continues his blank stare out towards the night.
“I hate her,” she whispers at his shoulder. “I hate her,” a low hiss through shallow breaths.
His face remains stagnant, hard and unmoving, but for the steady blink, blink of his lids, shooing out the stinging tears.
“She shouldn’t have done it,” she says from behind him, and he can almost hear the mournful shake of her head in the hollow quiet of the night. “She had no right.”
“No,” he breathes out, subtle and scratchy.
“I hate her,” she repeats, words filled with so much anger it hurts him to hear. But it doesn’t stop him from agreeing, nodding his head vehemently. And it pains him to so, sets off a deep and angry ache in his chest, one that rises slowly, thickly in his throat. To hate the little girl he once so loved. The baby whose diapers he changed on a rotating basis with his own son, dressed in John’s overalls or blue bunny PJs when he was too tired or lazy to search hers out. The toddler who took her first steps on his watch, waiting until he was turned away to clomp off in another direction, protesting with high-pitched squeals when he lifted her up, bouncing and cooing about how amazing she was. The kid who sat and idly debated with him the merits of Goodfellas versus The Godfather versus Scarface - three movies even Dean wouldn’t have allowed a twelve-year-old to see. The teen who just months ago scared the living shit out of him on a mere drive to the store, had him hanging on for dear life in his own car, the sweet, unobtrusive sound of her laughter echoing, even now, in the periphery.
He nods because it’s easier that admitting the truth. Easier to say that he hates her for all this pain than to admit he loves her despite it. Easier to blame and rail against someone who can’t stand up and argue back, than to try and understand the unfathomable. Easier to shove away the memories, deny the mistakes, than to simply stand up and move past them.
Rachel leans heavily into him, dropping her head onto his shoulder, soft woolen hat tickling his neck. And she says, barely even a whisper, so light and quiet that he almost wonders if it’s her voice at all, or someone else’s on the wind, “I miss her.”
And he nods again, letting his chin fall to rest on her head.
“I don’t,” she cries, “I hate…but…I just…” Hot tears trail down her cheeks, drop to his neck. “I want…everything…”
He lets go of the rail, throws both arms around her, lets her bury herself wholly within the tight circle of his embrace. The cold wind kicks up again, freezing the wet tracks of his own sorrow as he mutters simply, “Me too.”
Her face is buried in his arm, his shoulder, so he barely hears her when she says, words clenched and bitter, “I need to know.” He lets his grip loosen, pulls away a bit so that he can see her face, and gazes appraisingly. “I need to know what happened,” she expounds, clear and controlled despite the shimmer of tears on her face. “I need to know why.”
“Okay,” he says, not knowing what else to say.
She looks away, voice hitching when she says, “I don’t blame Dad for not knowing. Before, I mean…before it happened. I did. And I blamed myself. And I still blame her.” She lets out another long and telling sigh. “John said he gave Dad her diary,” she says, gaze falling back to him. It isn’t phrased as a question, but it’s clear she’s expecting a response.
“Yeah,” he replies. “He did.”
“Do you know what he did with it?”
He frowns, nods slightly, before saying, “He burned it.”
But she doesn’t seem surprised, doesn’t seem angry or upset at all. She simply straightens her back, letting Dean’s arm drop from around her shoulder as she turns away once more. “I’m not going back,” flows from her lips, cool and steady, assured. “There’s nothing I feel like I need to learn at school. Not now.” She locks eyes with him one more time, stare showing him just how serious she is.
“Okay,” he says, strong and true, a promise forged between them. “Okay.”
She relaxes a bit, swivels her head to the backdoor where the kitchen light shines through in a soft orange glow. Santa, bright red and white, looms off to the left, leaning precariously on the roof, and she’s tempted to send her father back up there in the morning to fix him, no snow meaning no excuse.
“Will you do me a favor?” she asks quietly.
“What?” he says, knowing better than to say something like, sure, anything to her.
She smiles, crooked and sly, and he can smell traces of beer on her breath when she says, “Tell my mom and dad for me? That I’m not going back to school.”
He laughs, a mix between incredulous and belligerent. “No way in hell,” he scoffs, turning to go back inside, tugging her along with him. “I take no responsibility for their kid being a college dropout.”
She follows behind, smiling a bit as she scrubs at her face, prepares to return to the celebration inside. “Chicken,” she mutters softly, taking one last deep breath before walking through the door.
It wasn’t really a fight per se, more just a passive-aggressive series of attacks between father and daughter. But between the two of them, that’s pretty much how fights went.
Sam and Sarah would silently glare at each other. Sarah and Maya would serve up dual silent treatments. Sam and Maya would scream and yell and pound on walls until the house shook. Even Sarah and Rachel had their own method of fighting - blithe and asinine quips shot back and forth, rapid fire. But when Rache had a beef with her father, or if Sam had one with her, that passive-aggressive Winchester hostility always took over.
She’s twenty-years-old now, not quite old enough to drink legally, but hey, they’re family and it’s a holiday. So no one objected when she poured herself some wine. Or when she grabbed a beer from the fridge. Or another. No one told her to stop once her attitude began to shift, cruel jibes flowing from a newly brazen mouth.
By the time Dean finds her, bundled up out in the cold, empty bottle dangling perilously from her fingertips, all he can think is Thank God there wasn’t egg nog. That shit is just as nasty coming up as it is going down. And there’s not a doubt in his mind, seeing her now, that something’s gonna come up at some point tonight.
“There you are,” he says simply, trying not to snicker at the drunken, wobbly double take she does. He sits down next to her on the cold wooden bench, lets his gaze falter out to the dark trees and grass beyond, the wide private yard where his kids used to play.
“Here I am,” she says slow and measured after too long a pause.
She slumps back into her seat and he turns to see her. “Been looking for you,” he says, before leaning back himself. “Kind of cold out here.”
She shrugs, barely perceptible beneath her heavy coat and scarf, and then turns to glare at her uncle. “I wanted to be alone.”
“Yeah,” he grins, noticing how similar her expression right now is to the one he had so cleverly labeled as drunken, pissy Sammy some thirty years before. “I kinda figured that. But, you know, it’s Christmas Eve, I figured your parents might get a little pissed if I let you freeze to death out here.”
She turns away, eyes out to the lawn, when she says, voice suddenly harsh and deep, “I doubt it.”
Which wipes the smile clean off Dean’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shrugs again, lazy and jagged, and lets out a sigh. “What would it matter?” drips slow and sincere from her chapped lips.
“Hey,” he barks, straightening up and turning towards her. “Don’t say shit like that.” She looks at him as though through a thick haze before quirking a corner of her mouth up in a seemingly coy grin, an I’m only kidding sort of smirk. “Your parents love you,” he says absently, almost as though rehearsed. “They’d care if you froze,” he ends with a light note to his voice, downplaying the fact that he can see in her eyes that she was serious to begin with.
She scoffs loudly, almost guttural, turns away with her lips set once more in a firm line. “They don’t even know how to care anymore.”
She’s been drinking for hours, maybe on and off all day, for all he knows. But he’s only had a couple of beers, no where near drunk enough to be having this conversation. And he almost says so, almost tells her, look, I can’t do this right now, today’s been hard enough already, tomorrow’ll probably be worse. But all that comes out is, “Rache,” a mournful sigh.
“They don’t even love each other anymore,” she almost slurs.
“That’s not true,” he counters, thinking, for the first time in a long time, that’s she’s too immature to understand.
“Last couple of days he’s been sleeping in their room. But it’s all a show, all for me. I know he hasn’t been in there in a long time.”
And Dean can’t help the, “What?” that slips past his tongue. Because, obviously, things had been tense around here, communication clearly lacking between the two, but… “How do you know?”
She glances up at him quickly, odd glare on her face as though she’d forgotten he was still there, didn’t think he’d been listening, and doesn’t now want to be bothered with his foolish questions. “He changed her sheets,” she says plainly, looking away. “Her bed, it doesn’t smell like Maya anymore. It smells like him.”
He takes a deep breath, tries to explain something he himself doesn’t fully understand. “They still love each other,” he says finally. “It’s just…this is a though time for them.”
“For them,” she repeats, venom to her voice, a statement and a question all in one.
“For all of us,” he corrects. “But you gotta understand,” he begins again, wondering if there’s any way to explain how fundamentally different it is to lose a child, how earth-shattering and all encompassing that sort of grief can be. “They’re all alone here, Rache. It’s just…hard.”
“I’m all alone there,” she counters, no emotion behind her words.
His hand instinctively falls to her back. “I know kid.”
But if she notices it doesn’t show, newfound words spilling from her despite his attempt at comfort. “Dad always understood her,” she says, tone too contemplative for someone sitting drunken in the cold. “More than anybody.”
“They’re a lot alike,” he murmurs absently.
“She’d do stuff…like, just flip a switch or something,” she tries to explain, “go…moody. She could be a real bitch, you know?”
He laughs under his breath, gives a slight nod. “Yeah, I know.”
“But he always knew…if something was really bugging her.” She shifts in her seat, turns to face him with glassy eyes, breath clouding the air between them. “When we were little, Mom used to make her take a nap when she got all grouchy, which never worked. She’d throw a temper tantrum and sit in her bed screaming ‘til Mom was ready to pull her hair out. But Dad, he knew if she was tired and needed a nap. Or frustrated about something. Or bored or just pissed at the world.” She stops just long enough to lock eyes with her uncle. “How’d he always know?”
“I don’t know,” he says, averting her stare. Because he doesn’t want to say something that might hurt her - they were just that close, had that strong a bond. Or something that she wouldn’t be able to understand - sometimes parents just know.
She shrugs her shoulders when he doesn’t go on, lets out a long deflating sigh. “There were times I thought I knew her,” she says, barely a whisper. “Now…”
“Yeah,” Dean comments softly, a simple agreement to an all too complex emotion.
The bitter breeze kicks up a bit, stinging all uncovered flesh. But neither make a move to rise, leave the cold, rejoin their family inside. Because even with hot chocolate and a fire in the fireplace, a smiling and laughing Ava zipping through random bits of gossip and a zonked out Michael on the floor, that place was anything but cozy and comfortable.
When she speaks again, an eerie sort of complement to the slight whistle of the wind, thick and cold silence surrounding it, the words seem sober despite their air of petulance. “Everybody knows she was their favorite. Everybody.”
He turns and stares wide-eyed, open-mouthed, for a long moment before, “Rachel,” falls from his lips in one light breath.
“I’m not jealous or anything,” she utters simply, meeting his stricken gaze. “It just doesn’t seem right is all.” She looks away, back out towards the dark. “She was always so…” she tries, making a tight-lipped, firm fisted gesture before finally finding the right word, “stingy. Like love’s so hard to give. And it just made everybody want it more. You know? Like it means more if you have to work for it.”
He nods, though she’s paying no attention and doesn’t even see. He nods because he’s never really thought of it before, never really realized how true that might be. Maya’d always been the independent one, the one who tried so hard to make it seem as though she never needed anyone for anything. But he’d never thought that in so doing she had been withholding her love.
Until now. Now, he realizes, that deep ache that would rise whenever she turned her back was exactly that, a sense of rejection.
Look at poor Sarah. It was obvious that she and Rachel got along, almost falling into that creepy my mom’s my best friend kind of relationship. They had more in common, shared interests, similar sense of humor, impassioned work ethic. Outwardly, it seemed, and surely anyone would say, that Rachel was her favorite child - if there were such a thing among parents.
But the look of sheer and pure joy, of love, that rose to her features on those rare occasions when Maya called her mommy, leaned into her wholly, trusting, letting Sarah wrap around her until they appeared to be one once more. When she said, hushed, almost secretively, an utterance just for her, “I love you,” that was a look he’d never seen Rachel spark in her mother before.
“I hate that,” she says suddenly, interrupting his thoughts. “I always hated that.” She turns to her uncle, eyes, though barely visible in the dark night, flickering in a dangerous and fiery way. “I hate her.”
Their eyes are locked for one long and knowing moment before he feels his body tense, features stiffen, as the deeply buried truth rolls up on him. “Me too,” he says pointedly.
“How could she do that?” Rachel asks, emotion filling her words.
His voice is level and deep when he responds with, “I don’t know.”
“It’s like she didn’t even care, like she never cared,” she almost sobs.
He nods, rising from the bench, stalking off to the edge of the porch, white-knuckling the rail.
“She was important, you know? She was one of us. And…and…”
“And she threw it all away,” he finishes for his niece. “All of it.”
Rachel straightens up behind him, fabric of her coat rustling against the bench. She snuffles once, swallows hard before saying, deep and controlled, “She never asked for help. We would have helped her. With anything. Why didn’t she ever just ask?”
But the question is unanswerable, even worse than rhetorical. So he says nothing.
She clumsily pulls herself off the bench, only feeling the heaviness of her drunken body once standing, and rubs her mittened hands absently together as she approaches her uncle. He doesn’t turn to look at her, only continues his blank stare out towards the night.
“I hate her,” she whispers at his shoulder. “I hate her,” a low hiss through shallow breaths.
His face remains stagnant, hard and unmoving, but for the steady blink, blink of his lids, shooing out the stinging tears.
“She shouldn’t have done it,” she says from behind him, and he can almost hear the mournful shake of her head in the hollow quiet of the night. “She had no right.”
“No,” he breathes out, subtle and scratchy.
“I hate her,” she repeats, words filled with so much anger it hurts him to hear. But it doesn’t stop him from agreeing, nodding his head vehemently. And it pains him to so, sets off a deep and angry ache in his chest, one that rises slowly, thickly in his throat. To hate the little girl he once so loved. The baby whose diapers he changed on a rotating basis with his own son, dressed in John’s overalls or blue bunny PJs when he was too tired or lazy to search hers out. The toddler who took her first steps on his watch, waiting until he was turned away to clomp off in another direction, protesting with high-pitched squeals when he lifted her up, bouncing and cooing about how amazing she was. The kid who sat and idly debated with him the merits of Goodfellas versus The Godfather versus Scarface - three movies even Dean wouldn’t have allowed a twelve-year-old to see. The teen who just months ago scared the living shit out of him on a mere drive to the store, had him hanging on for dear life in his own car, the sweet, unobtrusive sound of her laughter echoing, even now, in the periphery.
He nods because it’s easier that admitting the truth. Easier to say that he hates her for all this pain than to admit he loves her despite it. Easier to blame and rail against someone who can’t stand up and argue back, than to try and understand the unfathomable. Easier to shove away the memories, deny the mistakes, than to simply stand up and move past them.
Rachel leans heavily into him, dropping her head onto his shoulder, soft woolen hat tickling his neck. And she says, barely even a whisper, so light and quiet that he almost wonders if it’s her voice at all, or someone else’s on the wind, “I miss her.”
And he nods again, letting his chin fall to rest on her head.
“I don’t,” she cries, “I hate…but…I just…” Hot tears trail down her cheeks, drop to his neck. “I want…everything…”
He lets go of the rail, throws both arms around her, lets her bury herself wholly within the tight circle of his embrace. The cold wind kicks up again, freezing the wet tracks of his own sorrow as he mutters simply, “Me too.”
Her face is buried in his arm, his shoulder, so he barely hears her when she says, words clenched and bitter, “I need to know.” He lets his grip loosen, pulls away a bit so that he can see her face, and gazes appraisingly. “I need to know what happened,” she expounds, clear and controlled despite the shimmer of tears on her face. “I need to know why.”
“Okay,” he says, not knowing what else to say.
She looks away, voice hitching when she says, “I don’t blame Dad for not knowing. Before, I mean…before it happened. I did. And I blamed myself. And I still blame her.” She lets out another long and telling sigh. “John said he gave Dad her diary,” she says, gaze falling back to him. It isn’t phrased as a question, but it’s clear she’s expecting a response.
“Yeah,” he replies. “He did.”
“Do you know what he did with it?”
He frowns, nods slightly, before saying, “He burned it.”
But she doesn’t seem surprised, doesn’t seem angry or upset at all. She simply straightens her back, letting Dean’s arm drop from around her shoulder as she turns away once more. “I’m not going back,” flows from her lips, cool and steady, assured. “There’s nothing I feel like I need to learn at school. Not now.” She locks eyes with him one more time, stare showing him just how serious she is.
“Okay,” he says, strong and true, a promise forged between them. “Okay.”
She relaxes a bit, swivels her head to the backdoor where the kitchen light shines through in a soft orange glow. Santa, bright red and white, looms off to the left, leaning precariously on the roof, and she’s tempted to send her father back up there in the morning to fix him, no snow meaning no excuse.
“Will you do me a favor?” she asks quietly.
“What?” he says, knowing better than to say something like, sure, anything to her.
She smiles, crooked and sly, and he can smell traces of beer on her breath when she says, “Tell my mom and dad for me? That I’m not going back to school.”
He laughs, a mix between incredulous and belligerent. “No way in hell,” he scoffs, turning to go back inside, tugging her along with him. “I take no responsibility for their kid being a college dropout.”
She follows behind, smiling a bit as she scrubs at her face, prepares to return to the celebration inside. “Chicken,” she mutters softly, taking one last deep breath before walking through the door.