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Miss Tonya Reed owned and operated the StarDust Motel off of Route 66.
A relic from her youth—back when the world was a lot uglier, but the cars from Detroit still cut a smooth image on the highway—the StarDust wasn't exactly the Ritz. She knew it, and she refused to apologize for it. People, places, and things grow old and the motel was all of those things.
It was a person because it had a life of its own, and it was the one constant friend throughout her ten year divorce.
It was a place because people could find it on a map and set out to stay the night.
It was a thing because sometimes she imagined tucking the whole structure in her pocket and walking away.
She always wanted to go to Dollywood. Or an IKEA. Whichever she bumped into first.
There had been no shortage of weird and unusual sightings and interactions over the years. She herself was a weird and unusual sight to the upper class suburban tourists that took a wrong turn and the StarDust was their last resort. The kind of people who inherited family gems always asked too many questions—and looked at her trying to figure out exactly how sorry to feel for her.
Miss Tonya liked to say she operated under the good lord's guidance to live life big and loud.
Therefore, she kept her strawberry blond hair styled in flowing, three finger curls, and her EE breasts supported by the best bras money could buy. Her hips, she often accented with blue lycra, and she couldn't pass up aquamarine blue, three dollar flip-flops from the thrift store on Main.
She enjoyed encouraging folks that blew on through to do three things: sign their name on the dotted line, pay in cash, and don’t fucking trash the place. If people thought her odd for the way she looked, that was fine by her. But if tumbleweeds from fuck all nowhere thought they could immitate some dumb ass rockstar on a bender—they’d live to regret it.
Sam knew she saw all kinds of people and situations. He could tell this just by the way she spoke on the phone, which she was in process of when John and Dean led the charge into the lobby.
It was a Wednesday morning, not exactly normal check-in hours for a man and his two boys.
John conducted the usual business, and somewhere during the transaction, deemed Miss Tonya trustworthy enough to strike up a deal. He’d pay for two rooms instead of one, in cash, with something on the top for her if she’d keep an eye on the boys throughout their stay from ten in the evening to midnight.
On a Sunday night, over butter cookies and milk at the front desk, Miss Tonya painted her nails. She explained to Sam that coral wasn’t her color, but God worked in mysterious ways, because it made her fingers look less like sausages and that was good enough.
Sam sat next to her at the desk, perched on an old bar stool, transfixed by her drawl and nails.
Dean, too cool to care because he had just turned fourteen, planted himself on one of the four maroon armchairs across from the desk. He kept his eyes on the half-empty parking lot.
Miss Tonya’s voice sounded as slick as her nails.
“John Jackson,” she said, after her lecture on quality bras. “Now, I know that’s not your daddy’s real name.” She said this without malice. “I’ve been able to spot a fake name, a fake check, and a fake scratch’n win since I was your age, Sam. Paying in cash is smart.”
Sam answered as he had been taught to answer civilians. “Yes, ma’am.”
“But you know, the name suits him. In a way. Y’all fixin’ to be as handsome as him. Can you imagine your brother with a beard?” She gently elbowed Sam and shot him a smile. “Pretty as a peach.”
Dean rolled his eyes all the way to Jupiter and back. Sam didn’t know what to say, so he shrugged and ate another cookie. People seemed to mention Dean’s appearance with some frequency, and it usually made Dean uncomfortable. Sam could read his brother’s discomfort from a mile away—his reaction to Miss Tonya’s comment flustered him more than it bothered.
The butter cookie melted in Sam’s mouth as he tried to objectively observe his brother. Dean had the beginning of a strong jawline, though his face still retained a slightly rounded appearance to it. Combined with his freckles, the symmetry of his eyes and nose, Sam could understand why people voiced their opinions.
A thought flew through Sam’s mind.
Lips .
A mixture of confusion, anxiety, and excitement shot through him.
He licked the crumbs off his fingers and forced himself to refocus on the present.
At ten o’clock in the evening, Miss Tonya provided them with stick-to-their-ribs cookin’—mashed potatoes, meatloaf, and green beans piled atop Chinet plates. She refilled their plates without being asked.
Her care was as close to a proper babysitter as Sam could imagine.
As the bedazzled kitty cat clock at the front desk struck midnight, Miss Tonya yawned and ran her hand through Sam’s hair. He had The Cement Garden open in his lap.
“Y’all should be gettin’ to sleep soon enough. Don’t stay up reading, Sam.”
“I’m almost finished,” he countered.
“What kind of child,” she said, with a chortle, “reads stuff like that and calls it fun?”
“A lonely child,” Sam muttered, under his breath. His eyes went wide as he realized the assortment of words that fell out of his mouth. “I—I mean…”
Miss Tonya frowned and reached over to pat his shoulder. Her fingers truly did not look like sausages.
“I know. Don’t you think I don’t know.”
“You do?”
“Hell, have I told you what my job used to be when I was your age?”
“No?”
“Dean.” Miss Tonya patted the third, empty stool by the front desk. “Sit here a spell with us. Quit lookin’ out the window, your daddy’s coming along soon.”
“No, thank you,” Dean answered, with a huff. “Sam, go to sleep.”
Sam’s face contorted in anger and defiance. “At the front desk?!”
“Yeah, at the front desk!”
“ You go to sleep!”
“No, you —”
Miss Tonya’s voice boomed as loud as an eighteen wheeler popping a tire on the interstate.
“Boys! None of this shit, do you hear me?”
She took a long hard look at Dean, uncaring if he looked at her or not.
“You’re somethin’ else with your brother, do you hear me? One minute you’re making sure he eats everything on his plate and the next minute you’re bitchin’ at him like he’s your ward.”
Dean stood, fists clenched, and shouted at the volume of sheet lightning in an open field.
“Lady, I don’t care what you think! He’s my brother and I’m in charge of him!”
“Until your daddy scoops y’all up, I don’t think you got a leg to stand on, little man.” Miss Tonya pointed at the empty stool. “Now, either you sit over here until he gets here, or I tell him the whole damn story of how much you’ve pissed me off tonight and he can deal with you later.”
Sam tugged at the hem of her Cowboys t-shirt. “It’s all right,” he blurted out. “I shouldn’ta talked back. He just says stupid stuff. It’s fine.”
Still cheesed off, Miss Tonya sighed and shook her head. Her ringlets bounced back and forth. “Shit, I hate to threaten him, but my goodness . I don’t tolerate back talk here and I’m pretty sure your daddy don’t either. I know the kind of daddy y’all got.”
“No,” Dean grunted and plopped his butt onto the empty stool, arms over his chest. “You don’t.”
It was Miss Tonya’s turn to roll her eyes to Jupiter and back.
“I’ll excuse that because I know you’re just itchin’ to do some bitchin’. At your age, all I wanted to do was complain to the moon about the sun.”
Sam nibbled at another cookie, tenuously at ease with the three of them sitting in the same general vicinity. He kept a close eye on Dean, registered his body language, and wondered what it was like to be the oldest. Had he gone through the same confusion, the same anxious thoughts? What kind of information did Dean get to know that Sam didn’t? He got to know about monsters and ghosts years before Sam had—what more did he hold back?
What strange and unusual stories did Dean have to tell—if he could?
Miss Tonya reached under the counter and popped open the mini-fridge. She poured Sam another glass of milk and one for Dean. All the while, she spoke.
“Let me tell you a story, get y’all to wind down, because it’s quarter past midnight and I know a man who works overtime when I see one.” She put away the milk and doled out more butter cookies from a royal blue tin, pleased when Dean accepted one. “So I had myself a grandmother—Granny Ruby. She was a tiny spit of a woman, no bigger than Sam here.”
Dean gave a snort and Sam stole a cookie from him.
With a gentle touch, Miss Tonya laid her palm on Sam’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, you’re gonna be taller than your daddy and your brother one day. I can sense it. I’m psychic like that.”
“About people’s heights?” Dean looked at her with one eyebrow raised. “Yeah, what a helpful skill.”
“It’s damned helpful when I get fools rushing in here tryin’ to rob the place. I know six foot two from six foot four and the reason you can eat these cookies now is exactly because of that. Now. Quit interrupting.”
“Yeah, quit interrupting,” Sam chimed in. “I wanna hear the story.”
“You hear enough stories,” Dean volleyed back. “All you do all day is watch TV and listen to the radio.”
“What else is there to do?”
“You could help me mend your stupid clothes.”
“My clothes aren’t stupid—they’re your old clothes.”
Miss Tonya snapped her fingers. “Are y’all like this all the time? No wonder your daddy works so much.” She pointed to Dean. “You wanna hear the story of redneck dynamite or not?”
Dean took a moment to consider the question and eventually acquiesced.
“All right then,” Miss Tonya said, sitting up straight. “Now, no one messed with Granny Ruby. She had a shotgun and she knew how to use it. Here’s the thing you have to know about Granny—she ran a liquor store for the majority of her life. Some women claim they’ve been through tragedy and seen destruction. But they have never owned and operated a liquor store.”
Miss Tonya took out a nail file and kept going.
“Y’all might have heard of Tannerite?”
“No, ma’am,” Sam and Dean said, simultaneously.
“Good. An’ just because I’m telling you about it now, I don’t want y’all to think this is some kind of invitation to try shit with it. You hear?”
Sam could already see the wheels in Dean’s head turning.
“One day, Jo Jack come in drunk as a skunk. He’s the type of drunk you see on TV—foul smellin’, beer sweatin’ hunk of flesh. Granny? Nuh-uh. She didn’t like that one bit. She might’a run a liquor store that opened at eight in the morning every day, but she ran a good liquor store. No drunks allowed. Whatever you did after you left was between you and God. Well, Jo Jack didn’t take too kindly to her insistence that he get the fuck out. He swore up a storm before Granny pulled the shotgun from out under the register. Pointed it right in his face, she did.”
John occasionally parked the Impala outside a liquor store. Sam never knew if it was for liquor or to get snippets of news from the hunter underground. He would never know until hours after—it all depended on how much John would have to drink.
No news—more drink.
More news—less drink.
Miss Tonya continued. “The thing about Tannerite is that it’s legal. I could get some right now and say goodbye to this shitty ass microwave.” She kicked at said microwave below the desk. “Well, it wasn’t enough for Granny to chase him out with her gun. Jo Jack had been comin’ in for a while like that. It was clear to anyone that he was hankerin’ for a lesson. Granny was fixin’ to teach him that lesson.”
Dean grabbed his backpack and took out a pair of jeans that needed mending. Fascinated, Sam watched as Dean fished through a sandwich bag for thread and a needle.
“Kiddo, you surprise me,” Miss Tonya said, with a smile. “If you were ten percent less of a little snot, you’d be a gentleman.”
“Gee, thanks,” Dean grumbled. “So?”
“ So , Granny done had it.” She made a snipping motion with her hand. “She was gonna cut him off. And to do that with someone like Jo Jack, you gotta get the message across very, very clearly.”
Sam protected his last butter cookie. “How?”
“Well, Jo Jack lived like a pig. He lived in a one room shack on the edge of town, on a piece of land no one cared about or wanted. And like everything else in his life, he trashed it. He had sinks, toilets, and all kinds of other crap out on the lawn, like some horrible museum. Granny had her son, my daddy, help her act out her plan.”
All the while, during the story, Dean mended a rip in Sam’s jeans. He took care to select blue thread so that it wouldn’t look as obvious.
“Of course, daddy had all my uncles—all three of ‘em—help him, so really, it was a family event.”
Sam started to sink into Miss Tonya’s words, lulled by her accent.
“You always wanna stand the appropriate distance away, right? Right. So daddy and my uncles get a few containers of Tannerite. They find one good-lookin’ fridge—rusty, busted to hell—and that’s it. They stuck the containers into the fridge—two in the fridge and one in the freezer. Uncle Buster won the draw, so he got to add in an almost empty propane tank.”
Dean stopped sewing and looked up.
“No. Way.”
“Oh, trust me, sweetheart,” Miss Tonya said, one hand over her heart. “I couldn’t make this shit up. Uncle Teddy won the second draw—he’s the one who got to take up Granny’s gun, point it at the propane tank, and— BOOM .”
She cackled and slapped her hand on the counter.
“And that’s how you get redneck dynamite to teach a redneck lesson. He never showed up to Granny Ruby’s drunk ever again.”
The three of them emptied the entire butter cookie tin that night.
Miss Tonya would go on to live a long life, despite her knowledge of how to blow up appliances. She would spend long afternoons listening to Dolly on the radio, with crystal clear reception and not an ounce of static. She’d never question why that was, she’d only thank the universe for the fine music.
She liked Johnny and his boys.
They reminded her of what she might have had, had she chosen a different life.
She couldn’t have known the fear, the blood, the agony that sat behind John Winchester’s eyes—or what his sons would grow up to be and do.
Every Tuesday night, without fail, she scrubbed the front desk clean until it shone like one of the newer pennies in the register. She tolerated men who didn’t hit on her or proposition her, she liked guests who paid in cash, and she loved anyone who didn’t trash the place.
Miss Tonya was the kind of person who occupied the past, but stayed present.
At the end of the night, right when John arrived to pick up Sam and Dean, she showed Dean how to properly store his sewing supplies.
She handed Sam the last two cookies, then gave Dean the tin.
“You keep everything and anything you want right in here.”
Sam finds the tin in Dean’s duffel bag some thirty years later.
He thought Dean might have chucked it somewhere along the way. Or maybe it had met the same fate countless other belongings had—crushed, forgotten, or zapped to hell.
Sam holds it in his hands and smiles.
Cracking it open, he doesn’t find butter cookies.
He finds baseball cards, a flock of thread bobbins, a tomato-shaped pin cushion with four needles stuck in, enough buttons to fill a small jar, two sticks of gum, and a worn picture of Sam at the age of fourteen.
Dean wrote on the back of the picture, in his familiar block letters.
Keep everything and anything you want in here.