Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me, except my few OC's. Everything else belongs to Susie. The lyrics and title is from the song "You'll Never Walk Alone", originally belonging to Rogers and Hammerstein, though the version I have is covered by Johnny Cash. Either way, I don't own the lyrics or the title.

A/N: Well, here it is, the sister-fic that I've been talking about. I got this chapter written sooner than I thought I would, but I didn't want to miss the January '09 deadline that I had set for myself. Thanks goes out to RileysMomma, for being a good beta. :)


Walk on through the wind,

Walk on through the rain,

Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart,

And you'll never walk alone,

You'll never walk alone.

My breath hung in the chilly January air, slowly dissipating as the wind whipped it away. I tugged my coat around me a little tighter, glad that I wasn't wearing my old one. I'd had my old coat since I was a senior in high school and it was starting to show its age with various little holes in the seams and stains that just wouldn't come out. What had once been a glorious blue had faded into a dull grey. I'd had my eye on a really nice coat in the department store, a brown and red plaid, so imagine how happy I was to see it peeking at me through the wrapping paper on Christmas morning, along with a matching red scarf. It still faintly smelled of department store.

Usually I would head to the corner to wait for the bus after I got off work, but today was different. Today I searched for the blue Ford Tudor that belonged to my father and I soon found it waiting for me across the street, as all the parking spaces on this side had been taken. I saw him waving at me and I waved back, pausing to look both ways before I crossed the street.

His smile, I swore, could light up the world. I loved his smiles, especially when he smiled at me, and he was generous with handing them out. I loved the way it made the skin around his eyes crinkle, leaving little smile lines around them as if to prove how happy he was. His eyes were the only part of him that indicated his age. His tan skin was mostly smooth, and he had nary a grey hair on his head. But if you looked into his eyes, you saw the years.

"Hey, Charlotte!" he called out to me as I neared the car.

I smiled back at him. "Hey, Daddy." At twenty-three – almost twenty-four – I still called my father "Daddy." What could I say? Even though he wasn't my biological father, he'd always been Daddy to me, and I've always been his little girl.

He rounded the car with me to open the door for me, and as he did he said, "I got off work a little early today so I went ahead and got the flowers."

"Oh, thank you!" I grinned as I saw the bundle in the backseat. I always got the same thing: white roses and white carnations framed by baby's breath. It wasn't very big or grand, but Lora – the florist – always picked the best flowers for me.

The ride to the cemetery was quiet, as it usually was. Daddy seemed to know that I needed the quiet so he saved his stories and jokes for the ride back. I looked out the window, watching the rain fall and the window fog slightly. Most of the time I figured that it was for the best that I didn't know my real father; after all, you don't miss what you don't know. But sometimes, mostly on the way to the graveyard, I wished I had known him.

Mamma said that I resembled him in the way that I walked with my head held high, facing the world. She said I had his eyes, too, a dark brown highlighted by caramel flecks. And even though my hair was wavy like hers, it was the same dark mahogany color that belonged to my real dad, Charlie. I figured it must be hard for her, sometimes, to look at me and be reminded of him, but Mamma never said anything. Mamma never complained.

She hadn't come from a real good home. She said she was "just another statistic" when she got pregnant when she was in high school. She told me Charlie was a good man; he married her and did his best to provide for her, even though he was a dropout. He never went looking for trouble, but trouble seemed to find him anyway. It finally caught up with him when someone knifed him in the gut in what was supposed to be a weapon-less rumble. He tried to hold on, for me and Mamma, but it was a battle he couldn't win.

Daddy – Mr. Curtis – was a good friend of Charlie's and he did his best to help Mamma, who was seven months along when Charlie died. After I was born, the comfort they found in each other blossomed into something more and he married her two years later, adopting me at the same time with no questions asked. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The light in front of us changed from red to green and Daddy shifted and nudged the car forward, much to the old car's protest. It sputtered and the engine stalled as we started across the intersection. Daddy sighed and cussed under his breath as he tried to revive it. I shook my head at him, thankful that nobody was behind us as I patiently waited for the car to start. Letting my gaze roam, I looked over his shoulder out of the driver's window and I saw it coming.

An old truck was lumbering down the road at a good clip and it was not slowing down at all as it approached the four-way intersection. "Daddy …" I laid my hand on his shoulder and then pointed at it. He turned his head, and though I couldn't see his face I could sense the urgent change in his body language. He pleaded with the engine to start, trying every trick he could think of as the truck barreled towards us. "Daddy ..." I said again, much more urgently this time as I tried to open the door.

The damn thing was stuck and I couldn't get it to budge. "Daddy!" I shrieked, and as if in response, the engine sputtered to life.

I'd never seen a man shift so fast in all my life, but I figured he could've rivaled a race car driver as he popped it into gear and sped out of the intersection. He stopped the car for a second and we both looked over our shoulders to see the truck speed through the red light, right where our car had been.

I let out a sigh of relief as I turned back around in my seat. I heard a similar one from the driver's side as Daddy continued down the road, slowing down and then making the turn onto the dirt road that wound its way around the cemetery.

"Well, that would've been convenient, huh, dying right in front of the cemetery and all?" Daddy asked, trying to lighten the mood.

I chuckled a little, but still commented with, "Daddy, that's not funny." He flashed me that mischievous smile of his as he turned the car off.

I waited for him to come around and open my door. We had been having problems with the doors sticking, along with the transmission. It was annoying, but money was a little tight and repair bills were high. I knew that they were saving up to fix it, though, they weren't ignoring the problem. Rather, they were simply putting up with it until it could be properly addressed.

Flower bundle in hand, I walked the oh-so-familiar path to my father's grave. How many times I had visited, I didn't know; I remembered coming here to leave flowers ever since I was a little girl. Mamma would share little stories about him whenever she came and I grew to have a somewhat unique connection to my father through the years. It wasn't that Mr. Curtis wasn't a good dad, but there was a part of me that would always wonder what my life would have been like if Charlie hadn't died.

I knelt by the simple marker, reading the name and dates like I did every time. Charles Leif Cochrane. January 13, 1924 – December 29, 1941. January 13. Today; today was his birthday. He would have been forty-two years old today.

"Happy birthday, Dad," I whispered as I laid the flowers at the base of the headstone. Gently, I reached out to trace the engraved letters, remembering the photo that Mamma kept that showed a handsome, vibrant young man. Much like my brothers, and their friends, I often mused. They may have been separated by a generation, but they were cut of the same cloth.

I felt a hand rest on my shoulder as Daddy knelt beside me. "I miss him, too," he whispered, and I turned to look at him. He and my father had been close; closer, I suspected, than he let on. Charlie's death had hit him just as hard as it had hit Mamma.

The ride home was still rather quiet, compared to what it normally was. I guess we were both in a bit of a somber mood. As we pulled into the driveway, Daddy said, "I wonder what's for dinner?"

"I think Mamma said something about meatloaf this morning."

"Mmm, I love Maggie's meatloaf," he said, grinning at me as he shut the engine off and walked around the car again to open the door for me.

Darry and Soda and Pony were all wrestling in the living room when we walked in. Soda and Pony often tried to gang up on Darry, but Darry wasn't easy to beat. "Boys, you better be careful in there!" Mamma said from the kitchen.

She soon appeared in the dining room doorway, apron on and towel in hand. She smiled when she saw us walking in. "You're just in time. Dinner's almost ready." She turned to me. "Char, will you set the table for us?"

"Yes, Mamma." I went to my room briefly to set my coat and purse on my bed before I walked back to the kitchen to grab the plates and silverware.

"Did you go to the cemetery today?" she quietly asked me.

I nodded. "Yes, we did."

She smiled gently. "Good."

Dinner was as rowdy as it usually was in the Curtis house. Daddy and Sodapop loved to swap jokes, and we never made it through a meal without laughing.

My mother and I made eye contact across the table and smiled at each other as I raised my glass of milk to my lips. There was a lot of "what if's" that I contemplated from time to time, but I still wouldn't trade my family and the way we were for the world.