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"Mom wants to know what traditions you have," Jess says, peeking out of the bedroom where she's been on the phone.
For the last hour, Sam has been re-reading The Sorrows of Young Werther in the hopes that a thesis for his essay on Romantic fiction will magically present itself. He has no idea what Jess is talking about.
"Sam?" Jess prompts when he just looks at her blankly.
"Traditions?"
"Yes. What food did you always eat on Thanksgiving that the table won't be the same without? As long as it's not too hard, she's happy to make it for you."
"Turkey?" Sam says, because he knows that's the right answer. Or a right answer.
Except apparently not.
"No, duh, Sam. I meant other than the basics." Jess is looking at him with the slightly exasperated but fond face that she gets when Sam is paying too much attention to something other than the conversation she's trying to have with him.
"Right." Sam thinks. He only knows about the basics, so he's not sure what to say. "We never had anything special," he tries.
"Okay," she says, and comes over to kiss his neck. "There's always a mountain of food anyway. I'm sure there will be something familiar."
He nods and she kisses him on the lips and goes back to their bedroom where her own essay on ethics in anthropology waits.
Having lost his train of thought completely, Sam shuts his book on one finger. Thanksgiving. He would wish he never agreed to go except that, actually, he didn't. It was just assumed, when he said he wasn't going anywhere, that he would go home with Jess. Eat a bunch of food with people he doesn't know, spend the night on her parents' guest bed, with Jess down the hall in her old room, her parents' room between them.
This is the normal life you were after, Sammy, he tells himself. And he does like turkey. It might actually be fun.
Thanksgiving has always been a non-event in the Winchesters' lives. There was the year he and Dean ate leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken with biscuits and gravy, heated up in the microwave. Or the year they were on a hunt in the middle of Nevada and they roasted a rabbit over a campfire and didn't even realize until two days later that it had been Thanksgiving.
The best time was probably when he and Dean were staying with Pastor Jim and they all ate in the church with the homeless people and the congregants without families to go to. There had been turkey that year, and mashed potatoes, yams with marshmallows, green beans, tiny white onions, stuffing and cornbread, all made by members of the church. He'd loved those onions. If he knew what they were called or remembered more about how they'd been cooked, he could tell Jess to ask her mother for those. Mostly he just remembers he and Dean huffing onion breath in each others' faces for the rest of the night.
He guesses that's probably not considered polite when one is visiting the girlfriend's parents though.
"How's your essay coming?" Jess calls through the cracked-open bedroom door.
"It's not," Sam answers.
"Mine either. I think we should have sex instead," she says.
Sam agrees, one hundred percent.