Chapter title is from song by Angus Lyon.
70
The Long Road Home – Angus Lyon
The weather turned hot and muggy on their way south. Dean had the windows rolled down, the air thick with the taste of looming thunderstorms all the way through Missouri. Sam woke up when Dean turned off the freeway in Topeka, heading unexpectedly north before turning west again. Sam looked around at the unrelenting flatness of the landscape, where the curves in the road and the sparse farmhouses were vaguely familiar, and he sighed. He shouldn't have been surprised.
It was late afternoon when they pulled into Cawker City. He knew Dean had timed it so they'd get there when there was still daylight, to make sure the tiny souvenir shop across the street would still be open.
"Come on." Dean was saying to Zee. "We'll just get a postcard. He'll get it."
When Dean stole a glance in his direction, Sam just ducked his head and studied his shoe intently, not meeting Dean's eyes.
He'd almost forgotten.
He'd held the first postcard between a thumb and forefinger for a long time when it turned up, a month after he got his post office box at Stanford. It was just a 3' x 5' picture of a giant ball of twine (the one in Darwin) with a crooked Liberty Bell stamp. The card was creased on one corner. There was no message, and there was no return address.
The tangled thing that had been sitting heavy on his chest for months whooshed out of his lungs in a rush.
He hadn't been sure, when he left, how he'd left.
He hadn't known that he had doubted, until that moment.
A month later it was a giant pink elephant on the front with creepy-ass glowing eyes, postmarked: Inverness, Florida. Three months went by. Then in between his bills and some flyers there was a random picture of an unremarkable town, stamped Riverside, Iowa. He had smiled. Then came the World's Largest Jackalope from Douglas, Wyoming, and of course, he should have expected the Rhinelapus that followed. He'd pinned those cards on the fridge, and Jess had laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it.
He never asked, and Dean never said, but he had understood just fine.