Grandma's Song
Gloria saw him as soon as he came in, of course—a man that tall didn't exactly blend in, and when he was leading three little girls like ducklings and carrying a toddler...well. Add that to the fact that no woman came in with him...
In her experience, men weren't the ones who dragged the kids to Mass. When the wife was sick, men came alone or stayed home; at most, they brought one child. They never tried to bring multiple kids all by themselves. Not until the kids were old enough to be trusted to go to the restroom by themselves, at least. Men especially didn't take their little girls out of the house alone before they'd reached that age. People bent the rules for a woman bringing a little boy into the ladies' room; they didn't bend them the other way. And the child in his arms was a toddler; the colorful baby-print bag slung over his shoulder could mean she wasn't even out of diapers yet. There were reasons why the changing tables were always in the women's restrooms even now, despite decades of blathering about political correctness.
She'd never seen them before. St. Francis de Sales wasn't exactly a small parish, but Gloria was retired and widowed, and all but one of her children lived out of state, the result being that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren were for the most part pictures on her computer screen. That left her more free time than she knew what to do with, so she was involved with just about every ministry that would have her, and if she didn't actually know everybody, she was at least able to recognize all the regulars.
Her hunch that they were visitors was verified when none of the girls genuflected or crossed themselves as they slipped into the back pew. Maybe he was in the very early stages of inquiry, looking to join the RCIA class next year. Or—though it was a very slim possibility—he was only taking care of them for someone else. Most mothers would have put a baby with a female friend, though, except in a very dire emergency—and that kind of emergency usually moved church attendance to the bottom of the to-do list, even for the most devout. And if that was the case, he wouldn't have brought them to a Catholic church when it was so patently obvious that none of them were actually Catholic.
Curious, she kept an eye on them throughout Mass; easy enough, since she was doing usher duties this week and had to stay near the back anyway to help with the head counts and offering plates. The two older girls—twins, maybe; she certainly couldn't tell them apart—flipped idly through the Missal and songbooks, though she doubted they could read them, and none of the little group joined in the responses or the singing. Their participation was limited to standing when everybody else did. When it came time, they didn't kneel, just sat politely. The littlest one started fussing during the consecration, and the man slipped out with her, leaving the other three there.
Gloria automatically moved where she could keep a better eye on them, but they were the best-behaved children sans parents she'd ever seen. They stood when everybody else did, sat when everybody knelt, shook hands politely with the people in the row in front of them during the Sign of Peace, and didn't giggle once between themselves. There were kids who'd been here their whole lives, who knew all about the reverence required during Mass, who didn't behave that well. Some older than these girls. Some much older.
But no, the older two just sat there looking like twin angels in their identical blue dresses, their little sister in dark green sitting protected between them, until the man came back with a much happier toddler. Gloria was near certain he was their father by this point; children just did not behave like that for uncles or family friends, and despite the threads of gray in his hair, he was too young to be their grandfather.
People always started sneaking out after Communion—that last ten minutes before "Go, the Mass has ended" would just kill them, apparently—but the little family politely stayed standing until the recessional was past before he began collecting the girls. Gloria edged through the crowd in the main aisle, hoping to get there before they vanished on her. Somebody needed to give them a proper hello. Sometimes, that was all it took to make sure people came back.
She suddenly found herself confronted with the middle girl, who had gotten separated from her father and sisters in the crowd. "Hi there," she said. The girl just stared up at her, hazel eyes gone wide and frightened. "Need some help?" No answer. "Looking for your daddy?" That finally got her a hesitant nod. "He's right over here. Come on." She held out her hand, but the little girl wouldn't take it, so Gloria sighed and put a hand on her shoulder and directed her through the crowd. The child was small enough to pick up, but if she was so stranger-shy that she wouldn't even take an old granny's hand, picking her up would probably make her scream bloody murder.
She had no problems finding the man, of course—the only reason the little girl had gotten confused was that she couldn't see past anyone's knees. "Karen?" he was calling, a hint of panic in his voice. Trying not to yell in church, not yet, but Gloria suspected that wouldn't hold very long.
"Here she is!" she said, just as the little girl—Karen, obviously—caught sight of her father and hurled herself recklessly at his leg. "I think she was following the wrong shoes."
He nodded absently, as if he hadn't heard her explanation at all, his attention focused on Karen. He stroked her hair with his free hand and said something Gloria didn't quite catch before looking back at her. He had the same kind of hazel eyes as the little girl now clutching his leg, the kind that changed with the light—different from the littlest one, whose eyes were just this side of actual green, or the dark brown of the probable twins. "Thank you," he said. "They— We don't get out in crowds much."
"Not a problem, not at all. I'm Gloria," she introduced herself, "and everybody will tell you I'm in everything here. Hospitality, too." Karen hid behind her father's leg, looking bashfully out—reminding Gloria of her granddaughters at that age.
"Sam," he said, with a polite smile—forced, if she was any judge—as he hoisted the toddler higher up on his hip. That exposed his left hand; he was wearing a wedding band. So there was a wife. "Sorry about that. Aren't we, Karen?" he added, glancing down. The little girl's fingers dug into his leg. He was going to have a heck of a time prying her loose from his kneecap. "Sorry. She's kinda shy."
"No problem. I've got five of my own."
The sad little smile was more genuine than the polite one. "It gets less crazy, right?" he asked.
"It'll be better when your wife is able to—" That sad little ghost of a smile vanished, and Karen made a whimpering sound, and the two older girls glared at her like she'd just stomped on their puppy. "Oh. Oh. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean—"
"It's okay," he said, but there was a hitch in his breath that belied the words. "You couldn't know."
"Do—" She hesitated. "Do you need some help?"
"It's all us," he said. "Thanks again." He hitched the bag higher on his shoulder, got the toddler settled, and reached down for Karen's hand. To Gloria's surprise, the little girl promptly let go of his knee to hold her father's hand, and he led his little train of ducklings out.
After her little faux pas regarding the wife, Gloria half feared that they wouldn't come in the next Sunday, but there they were for the ten o'clock Mass, tumbling out of a well-preserved antique that would have had Karl, God rest his soul, foaming at the mouth in a bout of classic-car lust. She decided to help Sam unload—getting four young children out of a car without losing one to distraction hadn't been easy when she was raising them, and that was well before the advent of modern car seats, little escape-proof cages that they were. The already-freed kids could make it halfway to Tucson while you were trying to get just one of those damn childproof buckles unfastened.
"Why do we have to come here?" she heard one of the twins ask as she approached.
"I told you. We just do, okay?"
"But we never did bef—"
"Mary!" Gloria's heart ached at the stress in his voice. That man needed a break, and soon. Didn't he have any help? His parents, his in-laws, siblings, a friend? "I know it's not fun. But if we don't—" His voice cracked, actually cracked, and Gloria walked faster, hoping the poor man wasn't about to lose it here in the church parking lot.
"Sam! So good to see you again!" she said, coming around the end of the car. The twins gave her suspicious glares but promptly went back to working on Karen's car seat. The littlest one seemed cranky, but at that age, they were either happy, cranky, or asleep. Sam used picking her up to hide a swipe at his eyes.
"Hello—um—"
"Gloria. Gloria McGregor. And you're Sam...?"
"Winchester." He glanced at the twins, as if to make sure they hadn't run off with their sister.
"You know, last week, I didn't get all their names."
Someone somewhere had taught him manners, because his briefly exasperated expression was quickly throttled and replaced with something more polite. Completely fake, but polite. "No, you didn't," he agreed, and when he realized that she was going to stand there all day if she had to, "The twins are Mary and Mollie. You met Karen. And this—" The toddler in his arms suddenly lunged for Gloria, and only her father's very good reflexes kept her from tumbling out of his arms onto the pavement. "Little Miss Deathwish here is Deanna."
"Let me," she said, holding her arms out. Reluctantly, he handed Deanna over, which let him turn his attention to Karen. The twins had gotten her partially out, but one of the buckles, sized for adult hands, was beyond them. He unsnapped it, and Karen jumped out—and promptly slid behind the twins, clearly hiding.
"Kar— Never mind." He sighed. "Sorry about that."
"Oh, it's fine."
He locked and shut the car door, then unlocked the trunk long enough to pull out the baby bag and sling it over his shoulder. "Thanks for holding her," he said, coming back around and reaching for Deanna.
Deanna buried her face in Gloria's neck and refused to even look at her father. When Gloria tried to hand her over, she got a double-grip on Gloria's top and dug in.
"Deanna." He blew his too-long hair out of his eyes, and tried again. "Let go of the nice—"
Deanna said something, but she was a toddler, and it was kind of muffled by the fact that she was burrowing into Gloria's neck like some kind of parasite. Probably a "no."
"It's okay. Why don't I carry her and sit with you? After Mass, you can tell me all about yourselves."
"I'm sure you've got things—"
"Oh, I'm only on hospitality once a month or so. Free as a bird today."
There was a flicker of panic in his eyes, quickly covered. "Thank you," he said, "but we usually go over to Clyde's and get a late breakfast—"
"Sounds delightful," she said, and grinned when his face fell. Never take on a determined little old lady, son. "My treat."
"We can't possibly—"
"What part of that sounded like you had a choice?"
He blinked, and the twins gaped at her. "She sounds like Grandpa Bobby," one of them said, giving her father a confused look.
His mouth twitched, like he was trying not to laugh. "Yes, she does. And I never could win an argument with him, either."
"That's settled, then," she said, and set off across the parking lot.
She didn't argue when Sam and the twins headed for the back pew, just sat with them. Deanna wanted back in her father's arms before the twins had even gotten settled, so Gloria made sure Sam had no objections and began explaining the key structures in the church and parts of the Mass to Mary and Mollie, who reacted with a bizarre combination that Gloria could only describe as wariness and faith—wariness of the stranger, and complete and total faith that their father wouldn't let anything happen to them. Karen had attached herself to Sam's other side, as far from Gloria as she could get. Deanna was still far too young to understand anything except that Daddy's hair was in reach. The boy needed a haircut.
Sam was utterly indifferent to the Mass, in a way she hadn't noticed last week. To Mary and Mollie and Karen, it was at least something that was still new and alien, and thus a little bit fascinating, but Sam hardly even looked up from Deanna. Why was he bringing them here? A promise to his wife? But if that was the case, why wait until the twins were this old? Did he just now trust himself to keep Deanna quiet for an hour or so?
Karl always had said she read too many mysteries.
Of course, he wasn't here to keep her from sticking her nose in this one, either.
Clyde's was full, of course—the Sunday all-day breakfast buffet was extremely popular—but Gloria had been coming here for years, since back when the owner actually was a guy named Clyde (currently, it was Dmitri), so she had a table reserved, and it was no problem to pull up a high chair for Deanna and an extra chair with a booster for Karen. The twins looked at her with astonishment and a touch of something that might have been worship. Miracles are us, she thought smugly.
For a few minutes, she wasn't sure Sam's wariness was going to allow it, but he finally decided that Deanna would be safe enough strapped into a highchair with Gloria watching while he and the bigger girls took on the buffet. It was a public restaurant, after all. Nobody was going to get away with anything without thirty other people noticing. Gloria waited until they came back, then went to fetch her own meal.
To say things were strained was putting it politely. The twins clearly were not ready for interlopers, Karen seemed to be shy, and as for their father— How many years had he practiced carrying on a perfectly polite conversation without actually saying anything? By the time the girls were done and Gloria was finishing the last of her banana, the only new information she had was that the twins were almost six, Karen was four, and Deanna was two—not much more than she had known when she met them in the church parking lot this morning. From his reaction last week, she suspected his wife was dead, not just divorced or otherwise gone, but she couldn't confirm it. Nor could she pin down exactly what "Grandpa Bobby's" relationship to the girls actually was. When she tried to bring it up, Sam talked about him with the kind of affection a child had for a parent, but he never once slipped and called him "Dad" or "Pop" or any such term.
Yet he didn't mention his own father. In fact, he didn't mention any family or friends at all.
She was trying to find out where he'd grown up—subtly, of course, and that noise in the back of her head was not the echo of Karl's laughter—when Karen said "Daddy" in a trembly little voice, with a nervous look at Gloria that she had no problems reading.
Before she could offer, though, one of the twins said, "We'll take her," and they slid out of their chairs while Sam lifted Karen out of the booster seat.
"Watch out for her," he ordered, and the twins nodded, each taking one of Karen's hands, and they led her off toward the restroom. Gloria was a little surprised that Sam let them go by themselves—but Dmitri, who had small children of his own, was paranoid about making his restaurant child-safe. He had a small army of part-timers—mostly semi-retired grandparents themselves, all thoroughly vetted—who worked solely as restroom monitors, so it wasn't as much of a risk as it might have been at another restaurant.
Besides, the other option was leaving Gloria—a stranger, without even Dmitri's intense background checks to ease the mind—with Deanna, completely out of his sight, and somehow, she didn't think Sam was about to do that. Even if Deanna was strapped into a high chair, happily occupied with a handful of scrambled eggs and applesauce.
Sam was giving his daughter a pained look—no doubt in anticipation of the fun that he'd have later when he had to get all that out of her hair. "Sam." He looked up. "Isn't there anyone who can help you?"
He sighed. "Not anymore. Bobby was staying with us, helping out—"
Gloria seized the opening. "The infamous Grandpa Bobby?"
One corner of his mouth twitched up, an almost-smile. "That's the one. He wasn't really, but he was the closest they knew."
"What about their real grandparents?"
"Dead before the twins were born," he said flatly. She blinked. People usually weren't quite that plain-spoken about the deceased. "Anyway, he'd been helping since April—died—but—" He couldn't quite meet her eyes. "He died a couple of months ago. Suddenly. That's part of the reason the twins are suspicious of you. I think they're afraid I'm going to try to find a replacement, so they've been really short with the—ah—"
"Elderly?" she finished, and got that embarrassed little smile again. "That's okay, I understand. But there's no one else? Nobody at all?"
"No." Patiently, he pried Deanna's chubby fingers from a sausage link before she tried to shove the whole thing into her mouth, then broke it into appropriately toddler-sized pieces. "My wife's parents—well, her dad and stepmother; her mom died when she was little—died in a car crash right before the twins were born. My mom was killed in a fire when I was a baby. Dad never remarried, and then he died about twenty years ago." Interesting. All that death, yet he never said passed away or any other euphemism, always opting for the blunter wording. "Bobby—um—worked with Dad. He was kind of a second father to me. Anyhow, April was an only child, so there's nobody left on that side. I do have a brother, but—" He hesitated. "Dean's been at St. Catherine's for eighteen years."
It took her a second to place St. Catherine's, to realize he meant the hospital and not a parish somewhere. The long-term care facility outside of town. "Oh. I'm so sorry."
"I've got a couple of friends in Nebraska—almost family, really, like Bobby. But they can't come here, Ellen's got a business to run and a grandson to raise. And I can't leave Dean, and there's no other place I've found that can—handle—him."
"I see." Another burden. She wondered how many more he was going to try to carry before he realized the world wouldn't fit even on those broad shoulders. Depending on the precise nature of his brother's illness— St. Catherine's had a wide range of patients, from comatose to almost functional. How to bring that up tactfully...
"Lah!" Deanna said loudly, reaching out for him. He apparently understood her, because he reached over, released her from the high chair, and pulled her into his lap. To Gloria's surprise, the little girl didn't fight to get down, although she did reach for Sam's leftover syrup.
Gloria snatched the plate away, and got what had to be the world's most pathetically grateful look in return. "Sam, when you told Mary you had to come—"
"Oh. That." He looked down at the little girl in his lap, sighed, and pulled a wipe from the bag and started working on getting the worst of the food out of her hair. Was it so he wouldn't have to look her in the eye? "I hope you don't mind me using your church, but it starts later, and the Catholic Mass is shorter than most of the Protestant services. Plus St. Francis is on the way. To visit the—" His voice hitched, just a bit. "To visit April. And Dean."
So the brother was well enough for weekly visits. Gloria filed that away. "I don't understand. Why—"
"CPS has been trying to take the girls away since Bobby died. Since April died, really, but when he was there, they couldn't say I didn't have help. Now, though, they just keep coming up with new excuses. The latest has been that a man who doesn't go to church must be an amoral animal and children can't possibly be safe around him." Gloria seldom cursed, but Karl had been retired Navy, and that little nugget of information startled one of his choicer phrases out of her. Sam smiled, and then went on, "So before they got some idiot fundamentalist judge to back up that theory and take them away..." He let the words trail off, and when he spoke again, it was like some kind of dam had burst. "These last few months, since Bobby died— I thought the worst part was going to be getting the twins over it, they were so close to him, but we've hardly had time to grieve at all. There's been shrinks and psych testing and DNA analysis and home visits every five minutes and a tax audit and interviews with pretty much every person I ever spoke to. They threatened to arrest Ellen—my friend in Nebraska—if she didn't talk to them, and then tried to bully her into saying anything they could use. They even made me dig out my school records, all the way back to kindergarten—and that's been a whole other problem, because we moved a lot when I was a kid and I never stayed at the same school more than a couple of months. Half the schools I went to aren't even there anymore. At least three were in Topeka and their records went up when it did. Going to church once a week's pretty easy compared to all that, even if it did mean dress-shopping."
Another phrase snagged her attention, which let her more easily ignore the mention of the Topeka bombing—and his rather adorable shudder at the words dress-shopping. "DNA?" Why in the name of God would CPS be forcing DNA tests?
"One of the bi—um, one of them actually suggested the girls weren't mine. At first, I thought— I have an old criminal record, very old, I haven't even had a speeding ticket in fifteen years, but either the statute's run out or it was federal, and anyway, it was all dealt with. I thought maybe they just didn't get that memo, or somebody's computer didn't update properly, or something. Now? I seriously think somebody has a vendetta." He looked up from Deanna's hair, his eyes dark. "You'll probably be called in for an interview now. Sorry. I tried to warn—"
"What am I going to tell them? That you're a man with his hands full who should be encouraged, not treated like this?" She shook her head. "There has to be someone you can lodge a complaint with, Sam. That—this is abusive."
He shrugged. "What am I going to do?"
"This is America, young man. Sue them."
He shook his head, and looked down at the girl in his lap. "I can't risk losing them, too," he said, almost too softly for her to hear, and then the twins and Karen were back and the conversation had to shift to less adult topics.
Sam wasn't wrong. She got a call that Wednesday from someone at CPS, demanding an interview.
That was fine with her. She was going to let those people have a piece of her mind.
But it wasn't a good sign. They had to be watching him incredibly closely for anybody at CPS to know that he and the girls had had breakfast with an old lady at an overcrowded restaurant on a Sunday. Not just a caseworker, but something on the level of private investigator, which you'd think the state couldn't afford. And what did they expect her to be able to tell them, anyway? She didn't know where he lived, except that it was someplace located so that St. Francis de Sales was on the way to a cemetery and St. Catherine's; there had to be at least five cemeteries between the church and the nursing home, just on the direct routes, and she didn't know how far they'd driven to get the church, or from which direction. She didn't even know what school the twins went to, so she couldn't use a school district as a starting point. And when she'd checked, on a whim, there was no Sam Winchester in the phone listings.
The articles that showed up on her computer search, though, gave her a better idea of what he'd dismissed as a mere "criminal record." Talk about a misspent youth! But he'd been open about it, and he was using his real name, so it must have been dealt with, just as he'd said. Probably not prison; he didn't have that vibe. Probation of some sort, perhaps? He'd specifically mentioned the federal crimes, so maybe he'd been able to get some kind of deal with the Feds that negated all the local crimes.
The fact that she didn't have to wait at CPS made her even more wary. CPS was always swamped—the waiting room was packed—but even though she'd shown up twenty minutes early for her appointment, she barely had time to sit down before a caseworker had come to get her.
She made Gloria's skin crawl. There was something off about the woman, something that was just wrong. She said all the right things, was perfectly polite, but...
As they went into the woman's office, for a second, Gloria thought that the woman's eyes went black. Not just dark, but black. That couldn't be right. Trick of the light, maybe.
It didn't make her feel more willing to cooperate, though.
"Mrs. McGregor, have a seat, please." The caseworker closed the door, then sat down behind her desk. "I'm Linda Rowell. Call me Linda. Thank you for coming in. The safety of the Winchester girls is of paramount importance—"
I bet. "I don't know how I can help," Gloria said, dialing up her "confused old lady" voice. "I only just met them the other week, when Sam brought the girls to my church."
Linda rifled through a folder. It wasn't thick enough to hold everything Sam had rattled off. Maybe those were stored in secondary files. "That would be St. Francis de Sales, correct?" Gloria nodded, and Linda made a notation. "Yes. Those poor girls were growing up without any moral guidance whatsoever."
It took everything Gloria had not to roll her eyes. Christianity didn't have a stranglehold on morality, for crying out loud. There were people in her own church—including some of the more active members—she wouldn't trust as guardians of any kind of virtue. She wouldn't trust Rhonda Micire to teach a statue to stand still.
"Anyway, as you can guess, we keep a very strict eye on the Winchester household and who they come in contact with—"
"Why?"
The woman blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Why are you keeping an eye on this household, of all the ones in the city? There have to be several hundred where the children are in more danger than Sam's are."
Linda put on the most patronizing smile Gloria had seen since the day she met her mother-in-law. "We can't leave a grown man alone with four small girls. It just wouldn't be—"
"He's their father." It wasn't like Sam had picked them up off the street or bought them from a human trafficking ring. They were his children. And considering that they'd lost their mother and their foster grandfather, and the only other family they had was a permanently hospitalized uncle, they were doing very well indeed.
"I— Well— He has a criminal record!"
"An old one for which he has made reparations, and I seriously doubt you've gone after every man in this city who has a criminal record and then fathered children. Besides which, none of Sam's crimes were against children." Linda stared at her. Apparently, she'd expected the little old lady to be horrified at the thought that Sam had a Past. Why did every generation think they'd re-invented the wheel? "Maybe if your department quit focusing so much on the Winchesters, you could have prevented that Berzins tragedy last week," Gloria added tartly. Three of those children were dead because CPS had dragged their heels on taking them out of the house, despite the father's increasingly violent behavior. "As I recall, he had a criminal record too, and considerably more of one. Assault with intent and a boatload of drug charges, I think it was?"
Linda's jaw dropped. Must be one of those idiots who thought little old ladies only watched quilting shows and Lawrence Welk reruns. "That is neither here nor there—" she finally managed.
"Have there been any legitimate complaints made against Sam Winchester? At least, as far as his treatment of his children?"
"Well, no. It's more of a suspi—"
"So you're going after him because some idiot who works here thinks he might do something. Last I checked, young woman, you couldn't punish somebody for what they might do."
"We're not trying to pun—"
"The hell you aren't." More gaping, undoubtedly because little old church ladies weren't supposed to swear. "And just because Sam has a problem with calling a lawyer on you doesn't mean I do." She already had, actually, it was one of the perks of having put a daughter through law school, but she was saving that in case she really needed it, since Laura lived in California and was in criminal law, not civil. Laura would know exactly who to contact locally, though, and she had a soft spot for kids, so she wouldn't hesitate to call in favors. She stood up, phone in hand—not just to make a dramatic exit, which she was about to, but because it let her take a quick photo of the still-open folder on the woman's desk. "Quit wasting your limited funds and time, and quit harassing the Winchesters, or I may consider taking this to the media." The woman blanched—another scandal like the Berzins mess and CPS was going to be the target of an investigation. "I assure you that if I see any actual sign of mistreatment, I will let you know."
She marched out, leaving the woman stammering behind her.
Once safely in her car, Gloria opened the picture on her phone, rotated it, and grinned. Sam's address was right at the top of the page, clear as day.
Who said little old ladies couldn't learn new tricks?
It was a neat little light-blue house. The neighborhood wasn't great, but it wasn't precisely bad, either; safe enough for kids to play in the yard, but not safe enough for them to roam free. That monster of a car sat in the driveway, looking far too ferocious for its surroundings. Why did he drive that thing, anyway? Even with a converted engine—it hadn't rumbled the way a pure-gasoline engine fit for that car would—the mileage had to be terrible. And with four little girls to carry around, it wasn't exactly sensible. How had they crammed them all in when his wife was alive?
Maybe his wife had had her own car. That would make more sense, actually; a sensible car for carting the family around, and the antique for whatever sentimental reasons. If she'd died in a car accident, that might even explain why he hadn't replaced it—too many sad associations.
Gloria parked her own car behind that behemoth and climbed out—noticing a suspicious flutter in the curtains of the house across the street as she did. Spying neighbors. Well, that explained part of how CPS was getting their info.
You know, if the twins mentioned going out to eat on Sunday, that could be how these idiots found out about me, too. CPS undoubtedly has the school social workers on high alert. Mary and Mollie would have only needed to mention the church and her name—maybe in one of those "what I did on my weekend" things teachers liked to do. One call to the church office would have gotten the rest; as far as she knew, she was the only Gloria in the whole parish. That would actually be a better scenario, because it meant that CPS wasn't following Sam everywhere.
Well, if one of them got a call tomorrow about unauthorized visitors, they'd know for sure.
She rang the doorbell and waited. The front yard was tiny and somewhat indifferently mowed. No flowerbeds to speak of, either, and the walk was old and weathered. Sam wasn't one for landscaping. Maybe he focused more on the back yard, since that would be safer for the girls and out of sight of any spies.
Sam opened the door, Deanna in his arms, and stared at her.
Gloria felt her lips twitch. "There's something in your hair," she said, and his hand reached up and jerked the pink plastic barrette loose.
"Karen wanted—" He actually blushed, quite charmingly. "Never mind. Why—"
"I thought I'd come see you. Maybe see if you needed some alone time."
"Alone—" She shot a significant glance at Deanna, and his eyes widened. "Oh. I don't— It—"
"Let's start simple, Sam. May I come in?"
"Oh. Yeah. Sure." He stepped out of the doorway to let her in.
Was it her imagination, or did the boy relax once she was over the welcome mat?
It definitely wasn't her imagination that his voice was much warmer. "I'm sorry, Gloria, you surprised me. I'm—" He set Deanna down, and she hurled herself at Gloria's legs. "We don't get a lot of company that's not CPS, you understand."
"I know." She scooped Deanna up and gave her a tickle, earning herself an ear-splitting screech of happiness. "Hi, Karen," she said, glimpsing the other girl. Karen froze.
"It's okay, Karen," Sam said, but it didn't seem to reassure her any. Some kids just took longer to warm up.
The living room was spotless, though if CPS was dropping in at all hours, that was probably to be expected. It was also—well—bare. There was one large picture on the wall—a formal family portrait, Sam and his wife and all four of the girls, Deanna hardly old enough to sit up on her own—but no wedding or baby pictures, no art, not even a landscape. One side of the room had built-in bookshelves, but they were crammed full of actual books, not knickknacks. No scattered toys, the DVDs were all neatly lined up on a shelf, even the throw blankets were folded neatly. Gloria hadn't been able to manage this kind of neatness from the time she had her first until the last went to college.
"Um. Let me get the office closed up." He stepped into the door opposite the front door, down a hallway, and she followed him.
This was where the "personal" space of the house started, as opposed to the "public" space of the entrance and living room. There were pictures on the walls here—of the girls, mostly, but some of Sam and the woman from the formal portrait that looked like they might be from a very informal wedding, and older pictures of three different couples, undoubtedly their parents.
And one small picture, not much more than a snapshot, of a much younger Sam in a place that looked like a bar. He had a cast on one arm, but a beer in the other hand, and he was laughing. Good to know he could. There was another young man in the picture with him—shorter hair, leather jacket, an odd gold-looking pendant on a cord around his neck, and despite the scruff, almost as pretty as a girl. His eyes were the same green-hazel as Deanna's. Sam's brother?
Dean, she remembered, and looked at the girl in her arms again. So she was named for her uncle.
Sam ducked into a door. She caught a glimpse of toys spread out on the floor—blocks and dolls and a fire truck—a packed bookshelf, and a desk. The girls must play in there while he worked, so he could keep an eye on them. Deanna wasn't old enough to be trusted on her own yet.
"What exactly is it you do?" she asked.
"Um." He looked uncomfortable again, and hit a key that made the double screens go blank. "Research, mostly. Some phone work. Mostly freelance, but there aren't a lot of people out there with my—um—qualifications, so I get all the work I need, and they pay well for it."
"So you don't leave the house."
He came back to the door and pulled it closed. "No. I work from home."
"Ever?"
"Well, the usual errands. And we have our Sunday routine."
But next to no adult contact. Not anymore, with "Grandpa Bobby" gone. And with two of the girls still at home, not in school, he didn't get a rest from them, either.
"Sam, you can't keep going on like this. You need some time for yourself."
"No, I don't," he said flatly.
"I've been where you are," she said. "He wasn't dead, he was on a boat in the middle of the Pacific, but it was me and five kids, and let me tell you, Sam, I needed an afternoon to myself every now and then to stay sane." He opened his mouth, but she ran right over whatever silly argument was about to come out. "And don't tell me it's selfish, either. Selfish is running yourself into the ground, because if you break, what happens to the girls then?"
"It's only for a couple of more years, and then they'll all be in school." His eyes were distant, sad. "You'd be surprised what you can tolerate when you know it'll end."
He sounded like he was talking about torture, not spending time with his children, and now Gloria really was determined to make her point. Every parent got frustrated by their offspring at some point. Resenting them was a whole other ball of wax. "You shouldn't be tolerating it," she snapped. "That's why you need time off. Before you do something—or become someone—you regret."
His eyes went dark—and she didn't miss the way they flicked to one of the older pictures, a dark-haired man and a blonde woman. His parents?
Hadn't he said his mother died when he was young? And he hadn't mentioned a stepmother—his wife's, yes, but not his—so he'd been raised by a single father, too. Was this a mistake he'd made?
"It's not that I don't think you're right," Sam said finally. "Bobby and Ellen both said it, more than once. Bobby was bad about it, sometimes, when he thought I was pushing too much. But I don't know you. And I'm not trusting my girls with a stranger."
"See, that's a good reason." He frowned at her. "Which is why I'm doing this. Hold out your hands." He obeyed, and she dropped her car keys, cell phone, and wallet into his hands. "Deanna and I are going to have a tea party. Karen can join us, if she likes. You can work, or just hide in the office, or do chores, or whatever, but I can't run off with them."
"We have tea parties," Sam protested.
Gloria just gave him a look. The Grandmother Knows Best look. "We are going to have a proper tea party," she said firmly, "which means no males who aren't stuffed."
That expression of pure panic was totally adorable. She had to resist the urge to pinch his cheeks.
"It— But—" He was clearly looking for an excuse. Any excuse. "Don't you have your own grandchildren?" he blurted.
"A dozen, actually, and several great-grandchildren. But most of my kids moved out of state a long time ago. Only one of them stayed in town, and her kids— Well, one can't have children, and one won't. Not that I don't adore my great-grandkittens, mind you, but there's only so much spoiling one can accomplish with a seventeen-pound orange tabby."
"He doesn't do tea parties?" Sam said dryly.
"Heavens, no. Although he has a delightful trick with decapitated mice."
"God, don't tell the twins that. I've got my hands full as is." She raised an eyebrow. "I'm hoping they'll turn that fascination into becoming doctors, not serial killers."
"I'll light a candle for you."
"Thanks. I think." He looked past her. "Karen?" he asked gently. "You want to have a real tea party? With somebody who knows what she's doing?"
Karen edged out of the doorway where she was hiding. "In my room?"
"If that's where you want it," Gloria said.
Karen gave her another long, suspicious look. She looked just like Sam when she did that. "Do you know how to braid?" she asked.
Gloria glanced at Sam. "Knots, I'm good with," he confessed. "Braids, not so much. The video made it look easy, but— I'm not allowed to touch doll hair anymore, let alone theirs."
"That bad?"
"It was a disaster."
"Well, lucky for you, I am an expert braider." Karen's eyes lit up. "We'll have a tea party, and then we'll braid." Before Sam could relax, she added, "And then we'll give your father braiding lessons."
Really, the boy was adorable when he was panicked.
By the time the holidays came around, Sam had warmed up enough to list her as a backup emergency contact and authorized pickup person at the twins' school. It worked to his benefit in more ways than one, really; not only was she able to help him out if something happened with the little ones, but it was evidence of community support that showed he wasn't completely alone, no matter what CPS thought, and neatly derailed two attempts at having him declared unfit that were based on the fact that he had no family left. Because clearly no one had ever raised a child without the aid of a large, local extended family.
Honestly, if these morons had been in charge, Jesus would have been taken away from Joseph and Mary.
Every now and then, when she had a free afternoon, she showed up at the house and took Karen and Deanna off his hands for an hour or two, just because she could. Once the girls got used to her, it would have taken more than Sam Winchester to dim a small child's enthusiasm for ice cream and a trip to the park or the indoor playground at the mall. She picked the twins up from school occasionally, too, so they wouldn't feel neglected. Besides, it wasn't anything she wouldn't have done for any other overly-stressed single parent. She had, for several others in the parish, though none of them were quite as isolated or quite as stressed as he was. They at least had jobs outside the house.
She wasn't sure if his work was a good thing or not. Oh, it was good that he had a job, certainly, and that it was enough to maintain his family, and that he didn't have to entrust Karen and Deanna to strangers—but it meant he was always at home, alone, with no one but the girls. She remembered those painful days of solo housewifery too well—all two years of them, because two years had been all she could stand. Being stuck at home with small children was the reason she'd started volunteering in the first place, since back then a Navy wife didn't work outside the house if it wasn't absolutely needful. No matter how much you loved your children, sometimes, you just needed to talk to another grown-up. Bonus points if it was about something other than raising small children. These days, stay-at-homes had the Internet, at least, but online interactions could only help so much.
Not that it was entirely selfless. She was able to watch all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren through assorted social networking sites, but she wasn't able to be with them, and wasn't able to spoil them anywhere near as much as she liked. Half her family couldn't even afford to come back home at Christmas and Thanksgiving. If ever there were children who needed a grandma's spoiling, it was these four. And Sam, too, a little, though the boy remained stubbornly standoffish.
Then again, if she'd lost as many people as he had by that age, she probably wouldn't be a social butterfly either.
She gave him no choice at the holidays, simply told him that he would be at her house by ten on Thanksgiving, and if he wasn't, she'd send her linebacker great-grandson and the rest of his football team to come get him. Her family didn't mind; they knew that companionship was as much a part of the holiday as the food itself, and the Winchesters wouldn't be the first strays Gloria had brought home. For that matter, when he was in college, Bryan had brought half his dorm home every November.
Ah, those were the days. A house should be stuffed to overflowing at Thanksgiving.
She still wasn't sure why Sam had just given her a frighteningly bland smile at the threat, though.
At Christmas, Sam took the girls to his friend's place in Nebraska. Not without a fight, mind. Gloria was pretty sure his decision wasn't based on anything she said, but had far more to do with the fact that the nosy old biddy across the street was suddenly informing CPS of everything from late nights (clearly, the idiots at CPS had never actually raised a child, since they were claiming an 8:30 bedtime was abusively late) to their choice of TV programming, and it would take few weeks to get a decent fence built so that the interfering old bat couldn't see into the living room. Gloria got him a good deal through some people she knew at church, but they all had regular jobs, and trying to live there while that fence was being built was just asking for Deanna to try to eat sawdust—and that didn't even begin to cover the way Mary and Mollie were charming the workers out of everything from wood scraps to their snacks ("just like their uncle, dammit," Sam had said, with a sigh). The last thing Sam needed was for the twins to have personalized toolbelts with nail guns. Not with the way the school social workers were over-analyzing everything the twins did, looking for any scrap of an excuse to snatch them away. And not the way both of those girls were starting to show a decidedly morbid interest in anything resembling a weapon (which had earned another muttered "just like their damn uncle" from Sam).
"The twins take after their uncle, I take it?" Gloria had asked lightly, and Sam had actually glared at her. She'd nearly cheered, but restrained herself to a chuckle. That kind of glare was strictly a between-friends thing. She'd finally gotten through that shield of icy politeness.
That answered one question, though, one she'd never found a polite way to ask. His brother's problem was some kind of adult-onset one, not a disability from birth. If he'd been disabled very young, he would never have learned how to be charming.
Karl had been right. She really needed to learn when to leave a good mystery alone.
But with Sam and the girls gone, why, who else was going to make the Sunday visit to see Dean?
Tinsel and trees couldn't hide what the hospital was. No amount of seasonal air freshener could overcome the hospital stink, and all the swags of fake greenery in the world couldn't hide the signs and alarms.
There were a few families out in the front reception area; she guessed that those patients were well enough to come this far out without anybody worrying that they'd make a break for it. Anybody else, though, had to make it past the reception desk. The double doors behind it were glass—and anyone without a card had to be buzzed through.
Here goes nothing. "Hi," she said brightly to the receptionist. "I'm here to see Dean Winchester."
The receptionist stared blankly at her. "Dean Winchester?" she repeated, as if Gloria had just asked to see the Pope.
"I'm a friend of the family."
The woman's eyes narrowed. "Sam never said—"
"Sam's taken the girls off for Christmas and wanted me to do the Sunday visit."
The woman's whole demeanor changed. "He did go to Ellen's? Thank God. I thought we were going to have to mail the stubborn son of a bitch to Nebraska." The staff knew about Ellen. Was that good, or very bad? "Sign in here, please—" She indicated an electronic register. "And let's see— Dakota!" the receptionist shouted, and an orderly came over. "She's here to see the old man. Friend of Sam's."
Old man? Sam had said his brother was only four years older. That didn't make him old.
"He's been here longer than almost anybody else," Dakota explained, reading her expression. "And it— Well, he doesn't really care what we call him, you understand."
"I see." She didn't understand, of course, but if she said that, they might take another look at her story.
Dakota led them through the double doors, past the public visiting areas and activity rooms. "Lucky for you it turned off so cold," he went on, "that means he can't go outside."
"Outside?"
"There's a place on the grounds where he likes to go. It keeps him happy."
"But shouldn't—"
"None of the usual things work well for him. We've tried several times, but— Sam finally said it wasn't helping, so just make sure he doesn't get hurt."
That didn't sound like Sam at all. If something wasn't working, Sam insisted on finding something that did, he didn't just let it drag on. Half the reason he'd finally let her in was because he recognized that he—and the girls—needed a friend.
"Anyway, when it's too cold, he goes to the cafeteria, since it has a view, the other patients won't bother him, and we won't let him stay in his room. That much Sam is insistent on, he can't stay in there all the time."
"Makes sense," she murmured. And that sounded like Sam.
Lunch was over, and it was too early for dinner, so the cafeteria was empty and dark except for a small side counter with fruits and snack foods set out, and a string of Christmas lights over a buffet that someone had forgotten to turn off. The blinds were open, letting in the weak winter sunlight and a view of the winter-blasted gardens. A few patients, all bundled up, walked out there.
In the far corner, away from the door and serving lines, there was an old-fashioned straight chair, and a man sat in it, staring outside. He was dressed simply—sweatpants, sneakers, a worn flannel shirt like the ones Sam favored—but neatly. The only ornament was the silver tracking necklace that patients here wore. He sat perfectly still, feet flat on the floor, hands folded neatly in his lap, back straight. He didn't turn at the noise of Gloria's heels clacking against the tile. She could hardly even tell that he was breathing.
"Mr. Winchester," Dakota said, quietly, respectfully.
Dean didn't so much as take a deep breath. Not so much as a twitch.
Maybe Sam had told him there wouldn't be any visitors today, and he'd settled into some kind of depression. Or somebody hadn't done what they normally did to prepare him. She should have thought of that.
"Mr. Winchester," Dakota said again, a little more earnestly this time. "There's a friend of Sam's come to see you." He reached over and touched Dean lightly on the arm.
If Dean had been in the kind of contemplative trance that he looked like he was in, the startlement should have brought him out of his chair, maybe with a yell. Instead, he simply turned his head, slowly, to look up at them.
He still had his looks. Pretty was the only word that came to mind, albeit a completely masculine kind of pretty. Twenty years ago, he must have been the kind of heartbreaker that Karl used to chase away from their girls with a shotgun.
For that matter, if Karl had still been around, he would have probably employed a shotgun to keep Dean away from their girls—all their girls—even now. There was some gray frosting his hair, but that was the only sign of his age. Sam had far more gray in his hair, and his collection of stress- and worry-lines made him look much older than his big brother.
"Hello, D—" she began, but then their eyes met, and Gloria took an involuntary step back.
She'd trained as a nurse, a long time ago; one of her grandsons had spent time in a psych ward for manic depression. And she had never seen eyes as empty and dead as Dean Winchester's. "What—"
"Nobody really knows, ma'am," the orderly said quietly. Dean lost all interest—assuming there had been any there to begin with—and turned his attention back out the window. "He's an easy patient as long as we don't try to make him do anything, but— I've been here seven years, and he's never once recognized Sam. I don't think he even remembers Sam, let alone that they're brothers. I'm not sure he remembers who he is, to be honest."
Mother of God. That was— "All he does is sit?"
"He can take care of himself—dressing, bathing, that kind of thing. He had to be taught when he came here, though, he was like an infant. We have to bring him here for meals, or he won't eat. He doesn't watch TV, doesn't read the paper, doesn't do any of the activities. When we tried— Well, he has learned through the years that if he just sits down and refuses to move, chances are, one orderly can't drag him...wherever. And we're chronically shorthanded, so chances are there won't be reinforcements to help drag him." He sighed. "Even with the girls, he just sits there, staring at nothing—not that Deanna lets that stop her, she just makes him hold the turtle and builds games around it." He smiled at that. "She's a live one, that Deanna."
Gloria swallowed. Hard. "Do they know what—"
"What caused it?" Dakota shook his head. "I've never heard officially, ma'am, but a nurse with records access told me once it just happened. Like something short-circuited him."
"A stroke?"
"No evidence of one. No evidence of anything, after all these years, and they've done just about every test they know. I've seen his imaging file; it's three inches thick. Apparently, one minute he was there and the next, he just wasn't. Most people would've just warehoused him by now. Sam, though, he brings those girls every week, and his wife came with him before she was killed, and—"
"Killed?" Gloria asked sharply. Sam still only said "died," and she hadn't pressed the matter.
"Murdered, ma'am."
Holy— April had been murdered? Why hadn't he said something?
No, she knew that. He hadn't mentioned it because it was still too raw. Why hadn't it shown up on one of her Internet searches? She remembered finding the obituary, but not a single news article had come up with murder.
"You didn't know?" he asked.
"Sam—doesn't talk about her. I— We met at church, I knew she'd died, but I hadn't pushed for the details. I figured he'd tell me eventually."
"Ah." Dakota accepted that explanation. "We know here, but— You gotta understand, Dean's been here so long, Sam's almost like part of St. Catherine's himself. Him and the girls. We take up collections for presents for him and the girls at Christmas and their birthdays. Four of April's pallbearers worked here. Deanna, when she started walking? She took her first step from Zeffie—she's a nurse on Dean's hall—to Sam. There's only two other patients I know of who have been here longer than Dean, and they're both in the Alzheimer's wing. Early onset. They actually were warehoused."
"But Sam still visits."
"Every week and most holidays." Dakota hesitated. "I've seen families give up hope after months, with patients that aren't nearly as bad as Dean. Sam— I'm not sure he knows how."
She took Sam and the girls out to eat for Deanna's birthday. Sam was quiet, even for him, and when they were back at the house, after the cake and ice cream, when the girls were all in Deanna's room playing with the new presents, Gloria asked, "Is everything all right?"
"Fine," he said, his voice tight—but then he sighed. "Sorry. It's just— We weren't going to name any of the girls for Dean. Because he was still alive, and doing that seemed like it was giving up hope." She nodded, understanding. "But Deanna was born on his birthday, and—it just seemed like something we should pay attention to, you know?"
"It's Dean's birthday today?"
"Yeah." Sam started putting the leftover cake away. "It's funny. We hardly ever marked it when he was...here. Now I can't ignore it. Gloria, I can—"
"I'm not just standing here watching," she said tartly, gathering up the dishes. "Is there any chance? That Dean will...come to?"
He stopped, and turned around to face her. "You went to St. Catherine's," he said flatly. Not accused. He wasn't guessing. "When?"
"At Christmas. The Sunday you were gone. I thought, maybe, since you were out of state, it might cheer him up. I didn't know."
He sighed. "I guess I should have told you. Or at least made it clear that I didn't want you there."
"I'm sorry. It— You said you visited every week. I didn't think you'd take the girls if he was, um—"
"Missing?" he filled in, and laughed, a small bitter laugh that didn't sound like him at all. "And where would I leave them while I visited, Gloria? I don't exactly have a babysitter. April said it was important for them to know him, even like this, and by the time she was gone— Bobby couldn't handle it, but the girls were attached. Deanna—" His breath hitched suspiciously. "God, she loves him. He's never said a word, never acknowledged her, and she doesn't care. He's her Unca Dean and that's all that matters. She's never going to remember her mom. I can't take him away, too."
"Of course you can't." Gloria hesitated, but she was never going to have a better opening. "Sam—can I ask—"
"We don't know if he'll ever come back. At this point..."
"What happened?"
"It's—complicated. And—you might think I'm crazy, and you know I can't afford that."
"Sam, if there's one thing I am dead certain of, it's that you're completely sane. You could use a little crazy."
That got her more laughter—closer to real this time, but with an edge of hysteria. "A little crazy? All I've got is crazy."
"Sam—"
"I'm all right. I am." He sighed. "Do you believe in demons?"
"I— Well, I don't not believe in demons." The Church did, and she considered herself a faithful daughter of the Church, but demons were one of those things she preferred to leave in the realm of metaphor, at least until proven otherwise. "You think he's possessed?"
"No," Sam said definitely, "he can't be. He's been protected against it." She blinked. "Nineteen years ago, give or take, I was—hurt." She knew him well enough by now to recognize when he almost said something else. "Very badly hurt," he amended, as if to make sure she understood the gravity of the situation. "Dean made a deal with a demon. His soul for my life. He got one year. And at the end of that year— Normally, demons get their souls by killing the person in question. It's the easiest and quickest way. But they don't have to. And I'd—annoyed—that particular branch of demonkind. So—to punish me as much as anything—they took his soul, like he'd agreed, but left him alive. For the last eighteen years, Dean's body has been an empty shell."
He said that—all of that—so matter-of-factly that she had to believe it. At least, she had to believe that he was convinced of the truth of it. And the dead in Dean's eyes... She could certainly believe his soul was missing. That had not been mental illness or brain damage staring blankly at her.
"There's more," Sam said quietly, waiting for a reaction.
She dimly remembered Faust. What more could there be? Sell your soul, go to Hell, curtain falls. "What—"
"About twelve years ago, we—me and some others—we destroyed the dealmakers. Nobody can make deals anymore. We freed all the sold souls. Most of them were dead, so they had no place to go but to move on to wherever, but Dean— His body was here, healthy and waiting. He should have come back. And he didn't. We don't know why."
"Are you su—"
"Gloria, when I say I've seen Hell, I'm not speaking metaphorically. I was there." He raked his hair out of his eyes, something she was beginning to recognize as a nervous gesture. "I killed the chief dealmaker myself." At her bewildered look, he added, "They're vulnerable in Hell, in ways they're not when they're here."
"You've been...to Hell."
"Yes."
"I—um—" She cast around for something, anything, to say to that, and finally came up with, "I think I need a chair."
He nodded, and pulled one out from the kitchen table for her, then sat down across from her. "I know it's a lot. I know it sounds crazy. I won't blame you if you think you need to cut ties."
The matter-of-fact way he said that— The boy actually expected that she would quit talking to him and the girls because of this—this idea. How many times had it happened for him to expect that kind of abandonment? "I— It's just not what I was expecting, Sam, that's all. It— I thought you'd be more upset that I went to see him."
"You meant well. And it's not like I told you not to." To keep from looking at her, he started sweeping the cake crumbs across the table. "Bobby couldn't take more than five minutes, and Dean was always his favorite, even if he wouldn't admit it. Ellen made it through one visit. I..." The words trailed off, and what he said next was barely more than a whisper. "Sometimes, I think it might have been better if they had killed him. For him, if not for me."
"You don't mean that."
"No," he admitted, "I don't. It's just...hard, you know? Keeping him safe, keeping the girls safe— That's part of the reason I chose your church to go to when they started in on it. It's safer."
"How?"
"Any church—well, almost any church—is holy ground, just by virtue of the worship that takes place there. That wards off most of the undead and some lesser demons. But the Catholics and Orthodox still consecrate their churches, full-on ritual, and that keeps out everything but the very highest-ranked demons." He sighed. "There are religions that do even more of a proper consecration, but even if they had congregations around here, I figured CPS would use anything non-Christian against me."
Based on her own experiences with them, she couldn't argue with that. "How do you even know all this?"
"Do you remember me saying that my mom died?" She nodded. "She was killed in a fire. A demon started it. The demon. My dad wasn't the kind to just grieve and move on. He wanted vengeance. So he became a hunter of—of supernatural things, while he was searching for the demon. He raised me and Dean to be hunters, too."
"And your friends? Bobby and Ellen?"
"Them too. Ellen runs a—well, it's kind of an unofficial meeting place, but her husband and daughter were hunters, and she knows what she's doing. Bobby was as close to a scholar as hunters get, and he did backup for other hunters—he had a business to run, so he didn't roam the way Dad did. I do some of that now. Research for others, I mean." A small, sad smile. "Bobby would be embarrassed as all hell to know that he died of a stroke. Hunters just don't live that long, usually. We tend to go down fighting."
"We?"
He gave her a grim not-a-smile. "I wasn't just hurt, Gloria."
It seemed to help that she knew. Oh, she wasn't sure she believed all of it, even now, but that day, when she didn't run out of the room screaming or grab a phone and call CPS, seemed to crush the last of Sam's wariness.
Not that the boy was an open book—he still wouldn't talk to her about April's death, and he specifically requested that she not visit Dean again—but he relaxed, and let more things slip, things that made her understand why he was so attached to his brother, why he so seldom mentioned his father.
When Mollie got sick one night, so sick she needed to be taken to the ER right then, Sam didn't hesitate to call Gloria. A year ago, he would have taken all the girls to the hospital with him and driven himself batty trying to keep track of all of them and Mollie.
A sleepover made a fine adventure for three little girls who didn't have much of a social circle.
Of course, she caught Mary drawing something with a magic marker on the underside of her welcome mat. Gloria told herself firmly that that had not been a Satanic symbol that she'd glimpsed, and didn't pry the mat up to double-check in case it was. And then she caught Karen using two years' worth of salt to make lines on the windowsills and thresholds.
Gloria gritted her teeth, made herself smile—it was just a little salt, nothing the vacuum couldn't handle—and told herself that they were all worried about Mollie. Mary, especially. Separating those two was a nearly-impossible task. Sam had once expressed amazement that the school had managed to keep them in separate classrooms, and he still didn't dare let on that he'd requested that.
As for Deanna... She didn't understand much other than her father and one of her sisters were gone and the other two were scared, but she had the secondhand turtle Gloria had bought her at the church's summer yard sale and the blanket Gloria had made for a great-grandchild who had been stillborn, so she was content to curl up in Gloria's lap like the little girl she was and let Gloria read to her. But that night, when maternal instinct and the light sleep of the elderly made Gloria check on all the girls, just to be safe, Deanna was sitting up in the bed that used to be Laura's, her blanket wrapped around her and her turtle clutched tight, having quite the animated conversation with the windowseat and Laura's old teddy bears. Only she addressed them as "Unca Dean."
It turned out Mollie had appendicitis and needed immediate surgery, and she kept the girls for two more nights, since Sam was afraid that if he left Mollie alone in the hospital, even overnight, CPS would charge in claiming child abandonment. Each of those nights, she found Deanna having a conversation with her imaginary uncle.
Except... It sounded real. There were pauses like she was listening to someone else, she sounded like she was answering questions sometimes, and the conversations only took place after Gloria put her to bed. Gloria had been through the imaginary friend phase a dozen times; invisible friends tended to tag along during the daytime, too. And that room was suddenly freezing at night, no matter how she fiddled with the thermostat, no matter how hot the rest of the house got.
But she didn't mention it to Sam. She let the girls climb all over him when he showed up, and made the proper appreciative noises when Mollie showed her the stitches, but she didn't say a word about Deanna's nighttime chats. The man was exhausted, and he had more than enough to worry about.
It was probably just a phase, anyway.
It had been two years since that Sunday Gloria had watched a little lost family come in to St. Francis de Sales. The twins were nearly eight now, and even more fascinated by blood, guts, gore, and weaponry. Karen was six, a bookworm, and wanted to join the catechism classes, which made Sam even more uncomfortable than the fact that Mary and Mollie knew how to do a crucifixion properly. Deanna was four and brightly happy as long as she had her turtle and got to see her uncle every week.
It had been three and a half years since April's death. Two since Bobby's. Pneumonia last winter had nearly robbed Sam of Ellen.
Twenty years since Dean...left.
And one Sunday, Sam and the girls didn't show up.
It didn't worry her so much at first, but then Gloria got home, and there wasn't a message. He called when something happened that kept them away, if only so that he'd have backup for the inevitable CPS investigation. When she called, nobody answered. Not even when she tried the landline.
That worried her. So she did what any concerned old lady would do: she drove over. The car was sitting in the driveway, no sign of damage or trouble. Sam would have been out here trying to fix it if that were the case, Sunday or no Sunday. There was an unfamiliar gray van parked on the street in front of the house, with a logo on the side that said "Harvelle's." That was the name of his friends in Nebraska. Maybe they had come down to visit—a surprise visit, since Sam hadn't warned her about it.
A less nosy old biddy would have driven home at that point. But she'd heard so much about Ellen that she wanted to meet the woman. There were things that Sam still wouldn't talk to her about, things that Ellen might be willing to tell her.
She rang the doorbell rather than knocking—if Sam had a full house, a knock might get overlooked. "I'll get it!" a man's voice yelled inside—an unfamiliar one, which made her frown. No, wait. Ellen had a grandson who was an adult, or nearly. Maybe it was just him.
"It's probably Gloria!" she heard Sam shout. "I forgot to call her!"
"The girlfriend?" There was a chorus of indignant squeals from the girls, a woman's laughter, and a roar she couldn't quite make out from Sam. She smiled. The boy could use some teasing.
The door opened, and her jaw dropped when she found herself staring into the very-much-alive-again eyes of Dean Winchester.