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Feeling her cell phone buzzing against her hip, Ellen Harvelle throws a quick look around the bar and, seeing no one who’s likely to need her attention, slides it out and glances at the tiny screen.
“Bill,” she says, dropping her voice when one of the regulars gives her a bleary wink. “Where are you?”
“New Orleans. Coupla more days, babe, you should see what this thing’s doing. Nuns, fuck.”
Ellen pinches the bridge of her nose and tries not to sigh. “S’okay, Bill. Once the wicked witch is dead, you come on home.” She hangs up before he can tell her it’s not a witch, or it left a nest, or some other bullshit excuse for the excitement in his voice and the fact that he’s two thousand miles away from his wife and his eight-year old daughter.
Ellen knows someone needs to go kill the monsters. But there are days when—
The bell over the front door tinkles merrily, and Ellen looks up, distracted from her thoughts by the blast of frigid air that blows in along with a tall man in a dark leather coat. As she leans over the bar, he unwraps a ratty scarf, sprinkling ice crystals onto the bar’s glossy surface.
“Hello, Ellen,” he says, and hitches himself carefully onto a stool. “You wouldn’t happen to have a couple of bandaids, would you?”
“John Winchester! The hell are you doing in Billings?” She pulls a bottle of whiskey out from under the bar and slides a glass toward him. “Bill ain’t here,” she adds, in case he’s shown up looking for help with a hunt.
A flash of disappointment crosses his face, but he hides it quickly, turning the glass over and, left-handed, pouring himself a healthy shot. “No big deal. I took out a skinwalker in Missoula a couple days back, thought I’d stop by and see if I could buy Jo that birthday dinner I promised her last time.”
“That was two years ago, honey,” she says, smiling briefly. “Took her to one of those clown places. She hated it.”
He slugs back the whiskey, drops the glass onto the bar. “So does Sam. Hadda tell Dean to go back to parking him at libraries.” Something else crosses his face, something older and impossibly heavier, and when she pushes the bottle back across the bar he fills the glass and drains it, unsmiling.
“Ellen!” The boys at the end of the bar have their wallets out, so she pulls their tab off the pad and puts a big smile on her face. “Thanks, boys!” she says, as brightly as she can, and they leave her a damp and crumpled ten-spot before weaving across the sawdust-covered floor to push their way out into the late afternoon gloom. Out in the parking lot, the snow is drifting against the tires of her Toyota and John’s big black pickup.
Grabbing a towel and giving the bar a half-hearted swipe, she checks the second station, tossing a handful of slowly-dehydrating limes into the trash. She really should call Mags, tell her not to bother coming in – the way the weather’s going, the road out front is going to be shut down by the highway patrol before any of the evening regulars show up. And she needs to get home to Jo before that happens.
She’s pulling out her phone when the hard thump of boots from the other end of the bar reminds her that she’s got company. If she were a betting woman, she’d bet that John Winchester hasn’t taken a day off since his wife died. Which rules out dropping in just to say hi. “What are you doing here, John, really?”
He steps away from the bar and eases his jacket off, jerking his head toward his right arm. The plaid fabric is stained dark above the bicep, and as he lets the coat slip off his arm she can see that the stain looks wet. “Needs stitches, I think, and I can’t precisely handle a needle left-handed.”
“Shit, John.” She unties her apron and slings it over the bar, slamming the rest of the fruit containers closed at the same time. “There aren’t any doctors in Missoula?”
John grunts, looking faintly embarrassed. “None that weren’t gonna need an explanation,” he offers, and Ellen watches him until he’s flushed enough for her to decide it’s probably the truth.
Coming to a sudden decision, she grabs her purse out from under the bar and cuts the circuit breakers in case the storm gets any worse. In the bar’s long narrow parking lot, visible through the window now that the lights are out, the wind is spinning dust devils of bright sharp ice crystals across the asphalt. She shrugs into her coat, looping her scarf around her neck. “Come on,” she says. “You haven’t bled to death yet, and I need to get home before Jo’s babysitter leaves.”
John grins, a move that carves dimples into his face and makes his dark eyes gleam. Ellen holds out her gloved hand. “Give me the keys to your truck,” she says, and when he opens his mouth to argue, adds “Save it for your boys. No way am I letting you drive me through a blizzard one-handed.” She meets his eyes briefly and shoves at the door, pushing hard against the rising wind. “Or stay here. Heat goes off at 3am. Your choice.”
John looks at his truck and back down at Ellen, and then, shrugging, reaches into his pocket and pulls out his keys. “What are we waiting for?” he says, and follows her out.
*
Fifteen minutes later Ellen turns off into her own driveway and pulls the pickup into her space. The carport is close to full – none of her neighbors, it seems, are stupid enough to be out driving around with a blizzard blowing in. Somewhat surprised by this revelation, having met most of them over the last three months, Ellen switches the truck off.
“Can you manage?” she asks John, and when he nods, jumps down and heads for her apartment without looking back. “Rosie, Rosie,” she mutters, hoping the 19-year old she pays to stay with Jo between school letting out and her getting home from the bar hasn’t taken it into her pretty but remarkably empty head to leave with the arrival of the storm. But Rosie is sitting there on the couch when Ellen swings the door open, sweating into the rabbit collar of her white parka but there, and Ellen can’t help herself, she gives the girl a hug and the tenner from the bar. Rosie grimaces faintly and takes it by her fingertips, and disappears with a hasty wave in Ellen’s direction.
“Ma, what are we having for –“ Bouncing ahead of her by a good ten feet, Jo’s voice is loud and cheerful. When she rounds the corner into the living room and sees John standing in the doorway, her mouth rounds into a comically-perfect O.
“Close that door!” Ellen says to John, and “Fish sticks, honey, now give your Uncle John a hug,” to Jo, and in the ensuing chaos, manages to make it all the way into the kitchen before the rumble of John’s voice finds a gap in the flow of chatter from Jo.
She peels herself out of her coat and drapes it over a chair. Supper, she thinks, and turns on the oven, pulling a cookie sheet out of the cabinet and grabbing a bag of Tater Tots along with the fish sticks. There’s a head of lettuce and a couple of limp carrots in the fridge, but Ellen figures there’s even less point to serving John Winchester salad than her daughter, and leaves them there.
Once the food is in the oven, she reaches up and grabs the heavy-duty first aid kit, the one with the scalpels and the suture kit and the half pint of Jack Daniels, out of the cabinet over the fridge. She’s teaching Jo what to do with the light-duty one, and last summer, Jo had gone through a half dozen rolls of gauze patching up the bunnies and baby snakes the neighbor’s cat brought home.
That was outside of Memphis, in a house with an attic and a flower garden and a cul de sac full of witches a few streets over. After finding a tiny hex bag sewn into Jo’s Girl Scouts sash, Ellen had packed up their clothes and gone north. Not that north necessarily meant safe, but Ellen began to like the dry, sharp-cut landscape and the wide flat sprawl of the sky as she drove through the high plains beyond the prairie. She stopped, though, before they got close enough to Yellowstone to have to worry about bears. She knew how to ward off demons. Bears, though – wildlife was another matter.
Now they were in Billings, Montana, in an apartment her husband couldn’t find without a map. And if it was too small and tended to get grimy in the corners, well, it was cheap and as safe as Ellen could make it.
*
“John.” She pauses in the doorway that separates the kitchen from the apartment’s long narrow living room. John’s down on the floor with Jo, playing what looks like a fierce game of gin while the television babbles on behind them, unnoticed.
When he looks up and spots the first aid kit in her hand, he fans his cards out face-down and gets slowly to his feet. “Don’t look,” he warns Jo, sounding entirely serious, and walks past Ellen into the kitchen. She winks at Jo before following him. Jo’s eight, and a girl’s gotta take whatever advantage she’s offered, in Ellen’s considered opinion.
“Here, lemme get that,” she says, and undoes the snaps on the front of his shirt before easing it down over his right arm. “Jesus, John. Looks like you’ve been attacked by the Hound of the Baskervilles.”
He glances down, grimacing. A handful of slashes wrap around the meat of his upper arm, shallow and starting to scab. She’ll need to clean those out – if dogs’ mouths are dirty, she doesn’t want to know what lives on a skinwalker’s canines – but they’re not the worst of it: the blood, and most of the discomfort, she’d guess, are coming from a pair of deep puncture wounds that bracket the tricep.
“What were you doing, trying to teach it to dance?” She pushes him into a chair and runs the water in the sink until it’s steaming, then soaks a kitchen towel, wrings it out and wraps it around his arm. “Hold this in place for a minute,” she says, watching him for a moment before turning back to the sink. Some men just aren’t that good with blood when it’s their own, and she’s never patched up John Winchester before.
“You gonna put in stitches?” His voice sounds strained, and she grabs a glass out of the cupboard, grinning at him faintly.
“No,” she says, setting the glass down in front of him. “God only knows what’s in there, and if I stitch those bites you’re stuck with whatever nasty shit your boy was carrying. I’ll clean ‘em out, wrap you up, and if you’re still bleeding in another day or so we’ll take another look.” She uncaps the bottle of Jack and pours him a healthy shot. “Meantime, think of it like earning a lollipop at the dentist – you sit still and let me get you fixed up without yelling loud enough to scare Jo, this is all yours.”
Directing a fierce glare at her, John tightens his mouth into a firm line, letting one dimple escape as if to say Carry on.
Twenty minutes and nearly the entire tube of antibiotic cream later, she’s satisfied with her work and opens a couple of gauze pads. Taping them into place, she watches as a faint red stain creeps through the gauze.
“I don’t like this,” she says, but he only grunts.
“Wrap it up real tight and I’ll drop by the emergency room tomorrow if it’s still going. I probably re-opened ‘em doing the salt and burn, you know”
“Okay, it’s your arm. But at least take that shirt the rest of the way off so I can wash it.”
He shakes his head and shrugs back into it. “Nah, let’s get that daughter of yours fed before she substitutes all my suits for jokers,” he says, and without being asked, tosses the now-bloody towel into the bowl she’d used and carries them over to the sink. When he reaches for the first aid kit, she puts a hand on his arm.
“I can do that, John.”
“Sounds good. Point me toward the bathroom and I’ll get washed up.” He pauses in the doorway. “Ellen, I – thank you,” he adds simply, and she shakes her head.
“You’d do the same for Bill.” It’s the rockbottom promise of what they do, doesn’t need weeping over, she’s pretty sure. Meanwhile, dinner is starting to burn. She pulls the oven open and manhandles the pan onto the counter, and without turning around, directs John toward the back of the apartment. Once she hears his footsteps in the hall, she yell, “Joanna Beth, get your butt in here. I need you to set the table!”
Jo scampers into the kitchen and Ellen hands her the stack of plates she’d pulled out of the cabinet, following it with glasses and forks and a beer for John, and finally the little wicker basket full of napkins, which she grabs from its place on the windowsill.
Out in the yard, the yellow light spilling out of the kitchen window shows her the snow starting to drift against the fence that separates the apartment complex from the flat-topped foothills piled up against the western sky. On a clear day Ellen likes to imagine that she can see the mountains behind them, part of the great spine of the continent stretching down toward the Grand Canyon.
Sure, the big mountains out toward the Bitterroot hold their own dangers, like mountain lions and people living on parcels of land kitted out with fallout shelters and fully-automatic weaponry. That’s why they’re living here, in a place with grocery stores and pediatricians. Still, Billings is ringed with low mountains, and Ellen likes them, likes their sure and solid bulk looming up in the corner of her yard as if the land itself can balance the weight of the things they fight.
Sticking her tongue out at her reflection in the window glass, Ellen Harvelle wrenches her thoughts back to fish sticks and tater tots and eight-year olds and milk, and of course, that’s when the growling starts.
*
The noise is low at first, accompanied by a scrabbling sound right below the window Ellen’s standing in front of, but it rises fast in pitch and volume when John Winchester walks back into the room. He’s clean, she has time to notice pointlessly, the hair around his face shining with water and the sleeve of his shirt wet where he’s tried to get the blood out of it.
As he crosses the room the scrabbling stops and a high-pitched snarl replaces the growling. She grabs Jo by the arm, crouching down and putting her mouth up to the child’s ear. “Jo, honey, I need you to go do that thing we talked about, where you go wait in the bathroom until I say it’s okay to come out.” She tries to keep her voice low and calm, but she can see from the way Jo’s eyes widen that she’s not really succeeding.
Jo’s got her father’s nerves, though, and doesn’t do more than blink when Ellen adds, “Now, honey, go. Lock the door and don’t open it for anyone but me.” As Jo slips silently out of the room, Ellen levels a flat glare at John.
“Weapons – what kind?” Before he can answer, she’s moving toward the broom closet, which Bill had kitted out as a gun cabinet the first time he’d come home after she took the place. She pulls out a long-barreled shotgun and a sawed-off, tosses the short one to John and snaps, “Ammo, John, come on, answer me! What’s gonna kill that thing?”
He cants his head to the side and listens for a moment, then crosses over to the gun closet. “Never heard anything make that noise, Ellen, it sounds like a pissed-off Dachshund.”
For the moment, the building’s siding seems to be keeping the creature at bay, but Ellen’s not prepared to wait until it finds the point where the subcontractor cut corners. Dachshund, her size six ass. “I don’t care if it’s Stuart Little, I want it dead. Iron do the trick, you think?”
He starts to nod, then a look of growing horror crosses his face. “Silver, Ellen, dear god, I’m sorry –“
She reaches back into the cabinet, freezing as her hand touches the box of silver-loaded shells. Silver. Hadn’t he said he was hunting a skinwalker? She spins around, tossing him the box, hard enough to make him wince when he catches it. “So help me, John Winchester, if you’ve led something here –“
He dumps the shells out onto the table and with an awkward, left-handed grip, opens the chamber. “Is there a back door?” he asks, focusing on his hands as he loads the shells, as if he’s aware of how clumsy his movements are.
She watches him for a moment, then comes to a decision. “I want you in front of the bathroom door in case whatever followed you here makes it through that cheap-ass siding. And take your shirt off first – I got an idea.”
He yanks the shirt off and lets it drop into the floor. Without saying anything else – a wise decision, she thinks – he disappears. Left alone in the kitchen, Ellen loads her shotgun and pulls a silver blade off the rack that holds Bill’s knives. Most of them are gone, stashed in the back of his ’61 Lincoln, but some of those blades are hers, kept clean and carefully slotted into the felt-lined rack.
Sharpened, too – Ellen makes damned sure of that.
She slides the knife into a thigh holster and straps it over her jeans, grabs the shotgun and, gingerly, picks up John’s ruined shirt. Given what he’d said earlier about a salt and burn, she doesn’t think it’s the skinwalker John was hunting, but whatever it is must have been tracking him somehow. And the blood-stained shirt is Ellen’s guess for the what in that equation.
Holding the shirt at arm’s length, shotgun at her side, she walks out of the kitchen, heading for the front of the apartment. The growls and yips fade suddenly and then reappear from her front yard as she gets closer to the door. “Thought so,” she mutters, grimacing at the stained and dripping shirt in her hand.
“John, you in place?” she calls softly, and there’s a laconic grunt of assent. “Just keep in mind that if your little friend gets anywhere near my daughter you’re gonna wish you’d never heard my name,” she adds sweetly.
When he laughs, short and sharp, she gets herself into position, back to the entryway wall and the shotgun pumped. Counting down to three, she takes a deep breath, drops the shirt between herself and the door, and reaches for the doorknob.
The door slams inward and as the animal hurls itself through the door, Ellen fires and fires, and fires again. And then, although her shoulder is screaming at her and ears are ringing from the blasts, she climbs to her feet, rests the barrels of her shotgun against its narrow, white-furred chest, and pulls the trigger one last time.
Finally, the growling stops.
“Holy crap.”
Elle answers him without taking her eyes off the corpse at her feet, nudging its ass until it rolls over onto its back, spine flat against the floor and the hole she’d blown into its fur now surrounded by a generously-sized breast hashed with stretch marks. “John Winchester, you’re a poet.”
She can hear the rasp in her own voice and clears her throat, and John, crossing the room in two long strides, drops a large warm hand onto her shoulder and squeezes it briefly. “This wasn’t what you were chasing,” she adds, slanting a question at him.
“Nope,” he says. “Took care of that one back in Missoula. Never heard of it running in families, though.” His voice sounds as rough as hers does, and he tightens his hand on her arm. “Ellen, I swear –“
“Ma!” Equal amounts of fear and eight-year old fury rip through the thin bathroom door, and Ellen runs a quick hand through her hair and hands the shotgun to John.
“Coming, honey!” she hollers, and looks up at John. “Deal with some of this, John, please? I’m going to help Jo pack.” She doesn’t care if he thinks she’s running.
She is.
He grunts. “She’s gonna need a salt and burn,” he starts, and she nods.
“We’ll drive back toward Yellowstone, look for a likely spot. I’m not sticking around to see if the rest of Timmy’s family are coming after Mom here.”
Working fast, Ellen throws a few things for Jo into a backpack and dresses the girl in her warmest gear. She leaves her with the task of pulling anything that could qualify as a snack out of the fridge and, slipping on gloves and winding a scarf around her neck, helps John roll the corpse of the skinwalker into a sleeping bag and heave it into the back of John’s truck. The least it could have done was stay a dog, she thinks when they’re done, rubbing her lower back resentfully and watching John wedge the nylon-covered body into the back corner behind a pile of tires.
“What are the tires for?” she asks as he jumps down off the lift gate and swings it back up.
“Camouflage,” he says shortly, adding, “in case you’re doing a salt and burn near a town. Nobody questions a pile of burning tires.”
“Huh.” Filing that thought away, she turns them back toward the apartment and the task of getting Jo, the contents of her weapons cabinet and enough gear to last until they can get to a Wal-Mart into the cab of John’s pickup. Once all the gear is stashed in the space behind the front seat – no way is she letting it slide around in the back -and Jo’s buckled into the middle, Ellen locks the door to her apartment. Feeling like she’d done the same thing more than a week ago, even though it’s only been a few hours, she turns to John and holds out her hand.
He gives her a quizzical look and she snaps, “Keys, genius. You’re probably still bleeding. That’s my daughter up there – I’ll drive.”
He chews on his lip, looking like he’s going to argue, and she lifts one eyebrow and glances at her hand. “Now, John. Even if you can guarantee there’s no more of those things coming… what did you do with the shirt, by the way?”
“Burned it while you were getting Jo ready.” He jerks his chin toward the apartment complex barbecue pits, slowly disappearing under a veil of icy snow.
“Good,” she says, short and final, and he drops his keys into her hand.
Out on the highway she heads east, past the sprawling oil refinery and then south over the river. In the narrow ellipse of the mirror the city is gone, Billings and its grocery stores and its pediatricians and its mountains lost to the hellfire pouring out of the refinery’s smokestacks. Ellen shudders, a deep crawl of fear and some kind of weird premonition working its way up her spine as the refinery disappears behind a bend in the road.
To keep her mind off the next set of flames she knows she needs to face, she reaches over Jo’s head to poke John in the shoulder. “Never realized how ugly that thing was,” she says lightly. “How about some music? We’ll pull over in an hour or so, but in the meantime I’m pretty sure you don’t want to listen to me and Jo’s version of Walking On Sunshine. We got extra verses, though, in case you do --”
*
Afterwards, after handing Jo a flashlight and a dog-eared copy of Swiss Family Robinson and leaving her with orders not to unlock the doors even if Bigfoot shows up, after helping John drag the skinwalker out of the truck and into the woods, after dousing it in kerosene and setting it alight and watching until she was sure it was reduced to stinking rough-edged clumps of ash and evil, after all that and a bottle of water and a quick pee behind a rock, she glances at a map and heads south, toward Wyoming’s high plains.
John just scratches carefully at the tape holding the bandage onto his arm and shoves a Jefferson Airplane tape into the deck. “Wyoming?” he asks once they’re rolling again, and Jo has given up on her book and settled into his lap. He strokes her blond hair back from her face, an expression Ellen can’t read in the dim light twisting his mouth into a grimace. “The hell is in Wyoming?”
“Not Wyoming,” she says shortly. “Nebraska. I saw a postcard once, nothing but flat land for miles and miles.”
Jo mutters something in her sleep. John murmurs nonsense words in response, low and soothing, and she settles back into sleep with a sigh. “She’s getting big,” John says. “Why Nebraska?”
Ellen sighs and tightens her hands on the wheel. “It’s different for you. You throw those kids in the car and you’re one step ahead of the bad stuff. Or you’re tracking the bad stuff down.” She’s never really talked about it with him, but the news filters through the grapevine: John Winchester’s looking for something, and he’ll find it or die trying. Ellen can’t - can’t - do that to Jo, not the running or the dying. “I – John, I need to build a place that’ll keep the bad stuff out.”
He nods slowly. “And to do that, you need to see it coming.”
She’s never going to forget the shock of the skinwalker’s arrival, the heavy scratching of claws against metal as the creature worked its way through the siding and into the foundation. “From a long fucking ways away,” she says, biting off the words and glaring out at the mountains vanishing beyond her headlights. “No more surprises - everything’s got a mother, John.”
Damn straight. To keep Jo safe, she needed to see what was coming.
*
Montana gives way to Wyoming, and as the road climbs into the high flat prairie the storm loosens its grip and turns the road over to the moon. Ellen drives until she needs to pee again and wakes Jo up, lifts her off John and half-carries her into an all night diner.
“Bathroom, honey, then we’ll get something to eat.”
“I want Daddy,” Jo says, eyes closed and her mouth turning down, and John, coming up behind them, nudges Ellen out of the way and turning Jo around to face him. When she looks up, blinking a little, he smiles at her.
“May I have this dance?” he asks her gravely, holding out his left hand, and Ellen cringes as a small wicked smile twitches its way across Jo’s lips.
“Why, certainly, sir,” she says, suddenly arch, and John takes her hands, pulls her feet onto the tops of his boots, and, moving slowly, carefully, waltzes her into the truck stop. He fetches them up against the counter where a handful of sad-looking slices of cake are sitting under a glass dome.
“Perhaps they’re hiding the pie,” he whispers, and Jo giggles.
“I heard that,” Ellen says, glancing around. “Come on, let’s sit down, and maybe when we’re done with the vegetable part there’ll still be room for dessert.” Jo scampers off toward a table near the restaurant’s plate glass window and gazes out at the trucks rumbling in the parking lot. “Thanks,” Ellen adds in an undertone, and John smiles briefly.
“Mary and I always talked about having a girl. Probably a good thing we didn’t, after all.” He inclines his head toward a short hallway marked Restrooms. “You go first. I’ll sit with Jo.”
Without taking her eyes off her daughter, Ellen nods. There isn’t anything else to say, and somehow her face, wet and tired, seems to need washing.
*
She turns left at Casper and follows the road into southern Nebraska, pulling off the interstate in favor of the even more deserted Abraham Lincoln highway, a narrow road that meanders through a couple of tiny farm towns. Ellen is humming along to John’s lone Fleetwood Mac album and squinting into the rising when she starts to see signs for places that might work.
“What are you looking for?” John yawns and stretches.
“Coffee,” Ellen says, yawning in turn. “A grocery store that’s not too nasty. Not too much roadkill – I gotta teach Jo to drive one of these days. And a high school, one of those pretty ones with the big trees and the marble steps.” Her high school was a flat beige cinderblock structure that looked like it had once housed prisoners. Which it kind of had, she thinks, and glances at John. “You got those boys of yours in school?”
“What? Yeah,” he starts to say, and huffs a laugh. “Well, Sam, anyways. Kid loves school.”
The highway widens, takes on a left turn lane and a paved shoulder, and as the speed limit drops to 45, businesses start appearing on both side of the road. Ellen looks around, cataloguing auto parts stores, fast food joints, an antiques barn and a farm supply complex, but it’s when she slows down to try and figure out if any of the restaurants are open that she catches sight of a sign pointing her down a narrow gravel road.
For Sale: Roadhouse, it says, and she steps on the brake and hauls the truck into a fishtailing turn, waking up Jo and making John bite back a curse as his seatbelt strap digs into his arm. “Sorry,” she says. “I got an idea.”
The place itself is nothing much, corrugated tin siding and an ancient set of gas pumps out front, nothing but scrub and horizon for miles around it. She steps up onto its rotting wood veranda, clearing the dust off a window with her sleeve and peering in. She sees bar stools, a pool table, a handful of framed photographs hanging on the wall, and then steps back off the porch, gazing up the sign over the door. Roadhouse is all it says, but it’s surrounded by a festive circle of broken light bulbs.
Harvelle’s Roadhouse, she thinks, nodding, and turns back, trying to see Jo’s head through the reflection of the sun on the truck’s windshield.
John swings open the passenger side door and climbs out stiffly. “You talked to Bill about this?”
“What, while you were in the bathroom? No. Besides, he’s been busy lately,” Ellen says. “You suppose there’s a real estate office in town?”
He glances down at his watch. “Probably not open.”
It’s still early, the light creeping over the prairie still pink with the icy winter dawn. Ellen blinks her eyes, feeling the last ten hours behind the wheel scratching like sand at her eyeballs. She scrubs a hand through her hair. The decision, falling into place, feels right in a way not much else has in the last couple of years, and in spite of her exhaustion, Ellen starts making a mental list of what’s going to need to be done to get the old place going again. Plumbing, probably; electrical, definitely, and then the --
“Ma! I’m hungry!” Jo launches herself out of the truck and runs over to grab her mother’s hand. “Do they have pancakes here?”
Ellen kneels down and puts her arms around her squirming daughter, kissing her soundly on both cheeks. “They will, honey. Just not yet.” She stands up, grabbing Jo’s hand and throwing a grin at John. “But I bet they’ve got them in town. Come on, let’s go see.”
She glances up at John. “You a syrup guy or a fruit guy?” she asks, and when he grins, all dimples and tired eyes, she pushes Jo toward him, and climbs back into the truck.
~*~End~*~