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“This is John.”
“Hi, John, it’s me, it’s Adam.”
“Adam.” John blinked, straightened too quickly and nearly brained himself on the hood of his truck. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Adam said, that wry twist to his voice that reminded John too much of Sammy, of what Sam would have followed that with, words meant to hurt worse than his mean right hook. Would you care if there was? “Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine. I just. I need a favor.”
John frowned down at his boots, scuffed one blood-soaked toe into the dirt, already drawing up the map in his head. Six hundred miles to Windom, ten hours give or take. Kick it here until sunset, burn the bones and chant the countercurse, he could be at the Milligan’s door by nine in the AM. All this was background noise to the fact that, besides tracking him down and asking to meet him, John’s youngest son had never asked him for anything. “I can get to you by tomorrow morning. What is it that you need? Your mother okay?”
“Yeah, she’s fine. And. You don’t have to hurry, I mean, it’s not until Friday. It’s just. I need a ride.”
“A ride.” John scrubbed his palm over the half-grown wreck of what felt like poisonous shrubbery on his face. God, he needed a shower.
“Yeah.”
“How far?”
“Just down to Madison.”
John was pretty sure it was Tuesday, have to check when he got off the phone. Three days, even if it was only two, he could stop by Jim’s, rest up, get his journal back in order, wash the stink off his skin and go pretend to be a person.
“Friday,” he said, and let the hood drop, sliding back into the cab and starting his truck. “See you then.”
—
Kate and Adam were sitting on the front porch when he pulled up, sporting their identical looks of quiet incredulity when John climbed down from his truck. He looked back at it, hulking over every other car on the street, and gave a grim smile. Last they’d seen him he’d still been driving the Impala. Come to think of it he’d given her to Dean after that visit. After he woke up figuring he’d missed marrying the old girl to a telephone pole by about six inches with no memory of the last hundred miles.
Kate stood and came down the porch steps, dressed for work in scrubs and those white shoes John had teased her about when they first met, thoughtless banter that had led to one hell of a life altering night. She put her arms around him and kissed his cheek, as usual. And he hugged her, friendly but pulling back before the ache could set into his bones at the way his arm fit so easy around her waist. “Thank you so much for doing this, John, it means a lot that you offered. I wish I could take him, but…” She shrugged and crossed her arms over her chest, glancing back at the house.
He frowned, bit down on the offer to help with the money thing because he knew how that argument went, and looked hard at Adam. But the boy just gazed inscrutably back. Behind him on the porch were two large suitcases and a cardboard box.
Kate looked at her watch and grimaced. “I have to go,” she said, turning back to her son and tucking him into her arms. She was tall, but Adam had overtaken her sometime in the last year, and though she held him tenderly as an infant, there was a strength in his own arms. The boy was fierce. John felt a bolt of pride so strong it almost left no room for the guilt, for the grief.
“Be safe. Be well. Be yourself.” John had heard her say this to Adam several times over the years. Now she was whispering it into his hair as he stood with his forehead bent to her shoulder. “I love you.”
“I love you, Momma.” His voice shook, his shoulders trembling. “I’ll call you when I get there.”
John hauled Adam’s gear down off the porch and loaded it into his truck, waited for Adam in the cab, not wanting to see any more of their goodbye. When Adam climbed in his eyes were dry and the set of his jaw dared John to comment. He got them out of the city limits before he said, “So. You’re moving to Madison?”
Adam nodded.
“Got a job?”
Adam blinked, showed the hint of a dimple when John glanced at him. “Going to school.”
“Oh.” His gaze jumped to the rearview mirror, half expecting to see Kate behind them, like some vengeful spirit, her eyes brimming with grief and rage for letting him take her boy away from her. It was a sunny afternoon and the road behind them fell away, empty. “College?”
“Yeah. UW. Starts on Monday.”
“Huh.”
“I would have driven myself but I had to sell my car,” Adam said after ten minutes. “And Mom’s picking up shifts on another floor while this other nurse has a baby. So. Thanks.”
John grunted, nodded, leaned on the gas to swing around a semi. “How you payin’ for this?”
“Scholarship. And loans. And I’ll get a job.”
“Scholarship, huh.”
“Yeah.” Adam gave another smile, this one reaching his eyes.
When Adam forgot himself and relaxed into his expressions, he looked so much like Dean it was like a punch to the solar plexus. Dean at eighteen, though. Damn kid had been a force to be reckoned with. Where Adam was self-contained to the point of acting like he had a wall between himself and the world, Dean had been so damned cocky. This loud, brash force of nature, invincible with his little brother always in his shadow. Not that Sam had ever let Dean eclipse him, no sir. When Dean was eighteen Sam would have been just fourteen, full of life and desperate purpose, laughing and screaming with equal passion. Sammy at fourteen, before the world stole him away —
“I pretty much got a full ride,” Adam was saying. “Just have to pay for books and food and stuff.”
“Full ride,” John said, and was there was a goddamn echo in here? He tightened his grip on the wheel and eased his foot off the gas, slowing down to only ten over, turning on the radio to compensate.
All his life, John had only ever seen Mary in Dean’s face. Until Adam came along and suddenly he had to think that maybe Dean got something from him too because there’s too much of his eldest in Adam’s face to be all coincidence. And now this. Sammy’s smarts, the way he took to books like a fish to water, that had always been Mary’s legacy, too. This, though, he would concede to Kate and gladly. Hurt too much to think about too deep.
“What, uh.” John cleared his throat, lifting a hand to scratch at his beard but finding only smooth skin. “What do you want to do.”
It came out funny, not sounding much like a question. Adam huffed a soft laugh. “Pre-med. I got in for pre-med.”
“Med. Medical school. Like your mom.”
“Yeah.”
John nodded. Medical school. Goddamn. What was Sammy’s answer to that question, he wondered. What do you want to do, Sam? Couldn’t even hear how the words would sound if he asked them, cast the question in Dean’s voice instead. Wondered if Dean knew the answer. Glanced over at Adam and wondered what would happen if he stopped the car, turned around and took this boy back home to his mother. Wondered if Sammy had been this small when John let him walk out of his life. Wondered how he was supposed to live, knowing that his youngest — both of them — were out in the world, alone, unprotected. He couldn’t be everywhere, and these kids of his were so damn stubborn—
“I never told you this,” Adam said suddenly, and there was something in his voice that made it sound like he’d just said more to John in those five words than in the longest conversation they’d ever had. “I never told you this, but I wanted to be a mechanic, like you. The last two summers I had a job at a garage, trying to learn stuff, keep going with what you taught me. But. I. I just wasn’t very good at it. I wanted to be, I wanted it so bad. I—“ Adam shook his head and looked away, his face flushed, ears pink like Dean’s when he admitted to fucking something up.
“It’s okay, son.” The words were out, and John could only keep going, testing the truth of each word as it rolled off his tongue, easier than he would have thought. “It’s okay. When I taught you that stuff, it was, it was just something I wanted to share with you. Stuff I thought you should know. But I. I never meant for you to follow in my footsteps.”
Adam’s face was still red, but he was watching John openly now, weighing his words in that cautious way he had.
Thing was, this wasn’t his son. Of course he was, Adam was his son, but Adam wasn’t his to raise. Kate had made that more than clear and John got that, he really did. So the fact of Adam not being his meant that he let the boy look, let him try and sift whatever he wanted from John’s words, and John had no reason to snap at him, ask what exactly he’d been unclear about. He hadn’t raised this boy, hadn’t trained him. He might look at him sometimes and see Dean’s level head, Sam’s ingenuity, but he wasn’t a Winchester.
And thank God for that, he’d said to himself more than once, leaving his youngest son standing on the steps of a drab, cozy little house in Nowhere, Minnesota. I never meant for you to follow in my footsteps.
John stumbled over a memory, then. Something he hadn’t thought about in years. It was from the day Dean was born, when he’d left the hospital at noon to get some fresh air, find some food that tasted like it had once been something other than cardboard, stretch his legs in the sun and the knowledge that he was a father, now. He’d found himself standing outside the bank downtown, where he and Mary kept some money, where they paid the loan on their house. He’d walked in without thinking about it and announced to the teller that he’d just become a father, and he’d like to start a savings account for his son. Ah, like a college fund? the young man asked, and John had blinked at him and said, Yeah, sure, like a college fund. He had a hundred bucks in his pocket, so that’s what he put down.
And every month after that. Like clockwork, every twenty-fourth, he’d haul his ass down to that bank and hand over another Benjamin. Mary didn’t know. He was going to surprise her on Dean’s fifth birthday when, by his calculation, the account would have six thousand dollars in it. More money than they’d ever seen together in one place. When Sammy was born it complicated things a little, but he doubled down, and on the second and twenty-fourth of every month he marched downtown feeling like the richest man in the world.
Those damn accounts, John thought, his attention tugged sharply to his right when Adam shifted in his seat and coughed. John became aware of his lead foot and his long silence, but couldn’t think of a damn thing to do about it. Those damn accounts. For those precious four and a half years, he’d been a father and a husband. A provider. Protector. Planner. Everything was going to work out because he was saving for his sons’ futures. He’d been writing checks against that account ever since then, without thinking twice about the balance. Because I’m your father! How many times had he cashed that in? Often enough to hear it repeated in Dean’s voice. Because I’m your brother and I said so, stop asking.
“Adam,” he said, turning down the music. “Adam, how would feel about…” How would you feel about meeting your brothers? How would feel about learning the world isn’t a safe place? How would you feel about ditching this college crap and coming with me? Adam was still watching him, and John checked his mirrors, scanned the road ahead, caught the text on an exit sign as they blew past it and twitched the wheel, sending them sailing up the ramp. “How would feel about pizza for lunch? I’m starving. You in a hurry? No? Good. I want to hear. I mean. You can tell me about your, uh, classes. Okay? Tell me about what you’re gonna do with yourself.”