June 6

And all that pro and con turned out to be a total waste of snore-time when I got the package Missouri over-nighted from our old mail drop. The cosmos loves pulling stunts like that for shits and giggles as far as I can tell.

It was from Jenny Richardson, the woman who lives in our old house. She promised us years ago that she'd return anything she found of ours. Well, she kept that promise.

Turns out Jenny decided to have the duct work cleaned, and this box was shoved back into the duct in the downstairs guest bedroom so far that you'd never see it if you looked through the vent. It's one of those metal boxes people used to store their canceled checks and crap in.

Missouri said the thing has our Mom's aura all over it and her voice had that 'oh honey' sympathetic tone that puts my guts in knots. When she feels sorry for you out of the blue, you better watch your back or you might be kissing your ass goodbye.

I knew I wasn't going to just toss the thing into the trash unopened. I had to know what was inside. Still, I sat for the longest time with the thing in front of me on the bed. Just staring at it, even though it would take all of ten seconds to pop the lock and get it over with.

When I raised the lid, I swear I could smell Mom's perfume. Only for a few seconds, but I know it wasn't some mind-trick. I still don't know what to make of that. Probably nothing more to it than a trace of lotion from her hands or maybe she sprayed the inside of the box with the stuff for all I know. It was just freakin' strange to smell it again. Made the hair stand up on my arms.

Perfume or not, no doubt this was Mom's stuff. The first thing I pulled out was that silver charm bracelet she was wearing when I met her back in '73. If I'd had any doubt about it after that, the little beaded blue and white bracelets in there would have cinched the ID. Not much bigger than my ring, one had SAM spelled out on the white beads and the other had DEAN.

Of course, there was no reason to lock up a charm bracelet and two hospital baby bands and some other sentimental stuff and shove them up out of sight in an a/c vent. The real pay-off was the book that was in there with them.

At first, I just mulled over the stuff Mom stuck in her diary. Photos, mostly.

There was one of Dad in a full dress Marine uniform, standing at attention in front of knotty pine paneling in somebody's living room. He had private's stripes, so it must have been taken right after he finished boot camp. His eyes were focused up above the head of whoever was taking the picture, but even though he had that parade ground blank stare down pat, you can tell he was scared to death. Gah, he was just a scrawny kid!

No matter what that war was really all about, you had the guts to man up and do your patriotic duty. Thanks, Dad. That makes you a hero right there. Oorah!

Me, pulling my mouth out almost to my ears with my fingers, big spaghetti smears all over my face and down the front of that "I Wuv Hugz" t-shirt. You know I wuv you Mom, forever- but someday I'm getting some major payback outta you for that damn stupid shirt. What the hell were you thinking?

Sammy, real tiny in this one. Must have been three, four months old maybe. All big eyes and big mouth, reaching for a bright paper flower somebody's dangling in front of him. Nearly every time you looked at Sammy, you could practically see his tonsils. He looked like he was screaming his head off in every baby picture. He wasn't.

He was laughing. Sammy Winchester had to be the world's happiest baby. Mom claimed in her diary that he smiled at her before they cut the cord and I know for a fact that he didn't stop for a long time after.

Ok, I'm not going to think about when he did stop. That water passed under the bridge a very long time ago, and there's no fixing it. I was a little kid and stupid and scared spitless myself. I still regret what I told him that night, but if the truth hadn't come out then, it would have near then, anyway. It had to. Hell, I'm walking talking proof it always does, no matter how hard you try to keep it closed up in a locked box in the dark.

There were two little folded squares of wax paper tucked in there, too. One of them held a ringlet of hair that... well, there's no other way to describe it than pale gold, corny as that sounds. It has a reddish tinge to it and that would have been enough even if she hadn't tried to write "DEAN" on the wax paper with a ball-point. Obviously, my hair's darkened up a lot over the years.

The other one's marked "SAM" and the lock is glossy and almost straight and so dark brown it's nearly black. Pretty much like Sam's hair still is.

Both of them are so soft you can hardly feel them at all, like a baby chick's fluff. I can believe a lot of damn near impossible things, but it's hard to believe I was ever that little. I can't quite picture it. Sam, now, I can still remember exactly how his hair felt when he was a baby. Heck, if I concentrate, I can still remember how all of him felt then, soft and fragile and how he'd get heavier and heavier as he went to sleep, in that weird way babies do when you hold them a long time.

And I'm rambling again. I don't have time for that.

The picture I looked at the most, though, was one of those old black and white instant snapshots. It's a scruffy-looking guy with hair down past his collar and a half-hearted mustache, looking back over his shoulder. I didn't have a clue who he was till I flipped the picture over.

Yeah, holy crap. It's Bobby, when he was barely over thirty years old. You're probably way ahead of where I was then, because at that moment I sat looking down at that familiar stranger wondering why Mom would have a picture of Bobby Singer of all people, back in the day.

Hey, denial's a powerful force and I'm a friggin' black belt at it. Besides, even if you've figured out the who and what, you don't know the why yet. The how? Dude, there ain't no force in Heaven, Hell or on dear ol' Terra Firma powerful enough to make me imagine that.

Ok, moving on- the reason I spent so much time looking at the pictures and stuff was because Mom wrote her diary in code. Sneaky, Mom... and smart. It took me almost two weeks to crack it, and then another week of practice before I was able to read the thing like it was normal English.

My name, and Sam's, were the Rosetta Stones. You're probably thinking there's some deep meaning in that, but don't bet the farm on it. I'm pretty sure by this point that there's no deep meaning in anything- If you see some, it's only your brain trying to organize utter chaos.

I wrote down the code-key, but here's the most important parts for this. On March 18, 1978, she and Dad fought again, and this time it went nuclear. Dad packed his crap and stomped out. According to Mom's diary, he didn't call her or anything after that for a couple of weeks. Like that's not a familiar pattern, huh?

She'd had enough of the whole bad-romance tango by then, and decided to file for divorce. Then, on April 10, 1978, she wrote this:

When the phone rang Wednesday morning, I grabbed it up and said "John?"

There was a pause and then this almost familiar, deep cowboy drawl answered. "Uh, sorry, no. This is Bobby Singer. I'm trying to get in touch with Mary Campbell and I was given this number."

Of all the people I expected to hear on the phone, Bobby Singer was just about the last on the list. He and Mom corresponded a lot, trading research and keeping tabs on a lot of the Hunters in this part of the country. Mom really liked him, and she felt sorry for him too, I think, because of what happened to his wife. I never knew much about it other than losing his wife was what turned Bobby into a Hunter.

She did tell me he was an incredibly intelligent guy, and a sharp Hunter. That he might even turn out to be one of the best. They had a strong friendship going after a while, even though Mom never said much about Bobby around Dad.

I met him a couple of times when he and his partner Rufus Turner passed through Kansas, but I knew of Bobby, more than I really knew him. Dad wasn't exactly the social type, especially with other Hunters. Mom would invite Rufus and Bobby over anyway, and would always try to keep me from leaving to go somewhere with John when they were here.

Talk about your awkward social moments... Mom tried to be subtle but I knew what she was doing and to my complete chagrin, so did Bobby. At least she was more subtle about trying to keep me in the life than Dad was.

Bobby was all Mom said he was, and a friendly, handsome guy to go with it. Even though Mom's matchmaking attempts made him uneasy, he still liked me enough to pay me at least some attention. And yes, I flirted with him. A little.

So Mom's plans could have worked out, except that I was deeply in love with John Winchester by then, and even more deeply, absolutely determined that I was not going to live my life as a Hunter or god forbid, as the civilian wife of a Hunter!

It had been quite a while since Bobby passed through, since right after I graduated and long before...well, everything else that happened.

So yes, Bobby Singer was the last person on earth I expected to call that morning. "This is Mary. Mary Winchester, now."

"So you married that mechanic fella. Congratulations!"

I could hear the smile in his voice.

"How're y'all gettin' along?" he asked.

I burst into tears right there on the phone. I was mortified, but Bobby was nice enough not to hang up. In fact, he was really concerned.

Ok, I thought I could transcribe the rest of it over, but I can't. It's too... It makes me feel like a peeping tom, ok? Upshot is, she and Bobby got together, she cried on his shoulder, they got together-together. You're all grown up, you know how crap like that can happen.

I don't hold it against Mom. Not really. She'd had it to the teeth with Dad's emo garbage, and I guess she felt like she had already pulled the plug on their marriage, just hadn't filled out the paperwork yet to make it official.

And Bobby, hell, I can't begrudge him any happiness he was able to grab, no matter where or who with. I can't really even imagine how lonely he must have been, especially back that far.

And don't spout that crap about how it's better to have loved and lost, blah blah. I've watched Dad, and Bobby, and Sam suffer enough to know that having it and losing it is worse. It's so much worse...

Anyway, Bobby couldn't stick around because he was on a hot case, and Mom really didn't want him to, anyway. He was a Hunter, and she truly never did want to have anything to do with the life once she got out of it.

Then Dad came home a couple of days later, puking all those melodramatic, sincere, worthless promises that women have fallen for since bad relationships began. She let him back into the house and they celebrated.

A couple weeks later, she missed her period. Uh. Oops. Two guys, bareback, within a week of The Day? That puts a crimp in a woman's certainty for sure. She was going to have a kid. Somebody's kid, but definitely hers, regardless. She had to make her marriage work. Hell, she loved Dad still. She wanted to make it work.

So, she kept her mouth shut to Dad and to Bobby. As far as I know, neither of them ever suspected a thing. Nobody questioned that I might not be John Winchester's spawn- at least, not until that day at the bloodmobile.

There was something else stuck in that diary that really made me feel like a peeper. It's a letter from Bobby. Mom tore the bottom off, the part with his address and phone number and his signature too- but that handwriting's unmistakable.

It's damn near a love letter. A freakin' love letter from Bobby Singer to my Mom. Just writing that makes my head hurt.

It's pure Bobby, all blunt and gruff but kinda sideways sweet too. He never came right out and said he might be in love with her or anything. He said he understood about her not wanting to get tangled up in the life again, but he promised her he'd always take care of her, if she ever wanted to let him. That if she ever felt like she needed to leave John, to remember that she had somewhere to go, no strings attached.

Yeah, for Bobby, that was a flaming love letter right up there with the immortal classics.

I left it where I found it. I'll never read it again.