Chapter Seven - November 2004
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VII
November, 2004 - Dean
The thing about Dean Winchester’s Private Investigation Firm was that he did not do classic dick-work. After getting out of graduate school with a PhD in both Criminal Justice and Forensics-and a less notable and seemingly useless Bachelors in Differential Mythology and Religion-he had published a strange little book by the name of Ghostwalking which kept him from taking the bar exams due to a belief that he wasn’t psychologically stable. He published three other books, all on similar subjects, and, by the summer of 2003, had made enough money to set up his ‘firm’ all on his own.
The office was very noir: a tiny office over a laundromat in the Bronx, his name leafed onto the fogged-glass door; a desk, and a bookcase, and an open window to the noise of the street that he only closed during the worst part of winter. The people who came to him knew, for the most part, what they were getting in to. Except for his books, he never advertised.
For the most part, he got a lot of crazies coming to his door, trying to pitch their book ideas for him to write. Often enough, he got a real case. He got a majority of disappearances, mostly children or young teenagers. Every once in a while, he had to bring out the heavy artillery: shotguns with rock salt, exorcism rituals, talismans and amulets and Creole hoodoo.
It was nothing like he could remember his mother doing. It wasn’t Hunting-and he knew some Hunters, he found: Pastor Jim, Bobby Singer, the Harvell’s and their daughter Jo-it wasn’t even something the Hunters liked to admit existing. But Dean knew, deep in his heart, that it was the only way he could do something that felt natural, and not have to disappear into the woodwork or hide for the rest of his life.
-----
He marks the important appointments on the calender in his house, and stares at the red circles around the black numberS and his hurried, slanted handwriting, feeling foolish for having marked it there in all permanence. The anniversary of his father’s death sits a few slots down on the calender, also red and ominous, but this circle he’s just drawn seems much more pressing and life-threatening and terrible.
His cellphone jiggles silently in his pocket, and he pulls it out and says only, “Winchester.”
“Well, isn’t that professional. And here I was hoping I’d catch you all off guard and just waking up and stuff.”
Dean chuckles. “You’ve got your time zones messed up again, Jonah. I’m three hours ahead of you in New York.”
“It’s eight in the morning!” Jonah complains.
“Actually, it’s eleven, and I’m just headed in to work.” Dean grabs his jacket as he says it, and asks, “What’s up?” as he struggles one-handed into it.
“Marisol wanted to know if you’re coming to the reunion, blah-blah-blah, Dad’s on a craps shoot about your mom again, yadda yadda-oh, here’s something up your alley! I need you to come out to Seattle for the weekend and check my plumbing or something.”
“I think I saw this porno once,” Dean grumbles. Jonah laughs that disgustingly appetizing laugh of his, and Dean has to pull the phone away from his ear so he doesn’t end up hard for the rest of the day. “Dude, I’m not your plumber.”
“Oh, I don’t need a plumber. I need you to check my pipes, because I’m hoping that that’s what’s making the noise in the apartment.” Jonah chuckles. “It’s starting to freak Michael out.”
Dean takes the stairs down into the semi-warmth of the underground cautiously, counting the steps out of ritual habit as he asks, “What sort of sounds? Tapping? Grinding?”
“A little bit of both. The occasional groan, like the apartment’s settling or something. Some of that crazy-ass rats-in-the-cellar noise.”
Dean does swear, and then says, quite clearly, “I’m not coming out. Call Joanna Harvell, but I don’t deal with that sort of thing. I’m a PI, Jonah, not a fucking medium.”
“C’mon, Dean,” Jonah whines softly, and Dean can almost see it: Jonah leaning against his counter, all long lines, running his free hand through his brown hair and chewing his bottom lip a little. It’s a wet-dream sort of vision, and Dean forces it deep into the shadowy recesses of his mind. Jonah suddenly says, “Well, maybe I just want you to come out then. Even if you’re not going to clean my pipes.”
“I hear that innuendo, and I’m having none of it,” Dean growls, but there is too much affection and arousal in his voice, he knows. He taps a foot on the platform, and says, “I have a couple things I need to straighten out here in New York, and then I have a stop in Chicago. But I’ll put you on the list, okay?”
“I should get the top of the list, Dean,” Jonah says in his best sultry and convincing voice. Dean rolls his eyes, but knows he’s going to have to hide in the train. “You love me the best, after all.”
“Call me if things start moving on their own, I might move you up the list.” And he hangs up and sticks the phone back into his pocket.
The train arrives two minutes late, but Dean doesn’t really mind. It’s the nice thing about working alone and being entirely self-employed: he doesn’t have to answer to anybody, if he doesn’t want to. He settles in a back corner of the second car, pressed against the plastic of the seat and watching the early lunch crowd: a woman listening to music, several college students talking vapidly and with too much movement, an older man and his young son or grandson. There’s a man with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, long legs sprawled out before him, and Dean frowns a little; he can almost put names to faces on his train rides, and this one is someone he’s never seen before. It throws him a little.
He gets off four stops later, says hello to a security guard that hired him on for an investigation in that tunnel a year ago when he was still fresh and practically a no-name, and takes the stairs out of the underground two at a time where the crowd will let him. The Bronx is more busy with lunch than Manhattan had been, and he comes into the press of bodies putting earbuds in and turning up his Walkman so he can just barely hear the thrum of the city.
He stops at a diner on the third corner he passes, orders coffee and a sandwich to go, and flirts shamelessly with the thin-waisted Italiana running the counter. She winks and flirts back, squeezing her breasts between her arms; she never notices that he’s shooting glances at her tall older brother with the tattoo on his neck, and he likes it that way.
It’s another four blocks to the building with his office, but already the sidewalks are thinning of people settling down for lunch, and he gets there just as the clock above his filing cabinet chimes noon. His phone blinks with messages, and he presses the machine to listen to them all.
As always, most of them are crack pots off their medicine again. He deletes twelve of the eighteen messages, then listens to the remaining six again.
The first is from his mother, reminding him that she’s in Chicago, and she’s expecting him to come visit her since he promised he’d come around back in January of 2001 and she hates him living in New York now that everything has happened since September of that year. The fourth is from Pastor Jim with Joanna Harvell’s voice in the background, asking if he’ll be back any time soon because Joanna’s interested in using his investigative techniques for a Hunt of hers; that will be the first call he returns, he knows.
The sixth is an odd little message because most of it is the dull noise of night and a single car driving by, and then a voice he vaguely remembers, gravelly and worried, saying, “Dean. Dean, we need to talk. I’ll try again some other time.”
The other three are clients in and around the City-one from Jersey, but he qualifies that for ‘around the City,’ considering some of his clients have been from Florida or the Midwest. He jots each number into his Rolodex neatly, sits behind his desk with his coffee and sandwich, and dials Pastor Jim.
Joanna picks up on the second ring, and Dean grins when she is very polite on the phone. He leans back in his chair and says, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you be that friendly, Joanna Beth. I think I need to call Aunt Ellen and tell her she finally raised you right when she drove you out on your ass.”
“Dean,” she simpers. “Took you long enough gettin’ back to us.”
“You called late. I leave my office when I’m done with dinner, unless I’ve got somethin’ big to work on.” She chuckles slightly. “What do you want me for, huh? I’ve got about a hundred cases to follow up on, and I’m goin’ to see Momma for the anniversary, and then I’m headed over to Seattle after she’s done with me. When do you need me?”
“Yesterday?”
Dean swears. “Can’t you keep me on as consult? What’s up?”
And she details it in a way that would make any Hunter proud: missing children, all born on or around May first, August twenty-second or March twentieth, all gone on October thirty-first like clockwork. Two of them turned up dead. It was a long-standing situation, but that year had been particularly bad, and the parents were actively seeking aid of anyone who could help.
“It’s Sidhe, Jo,” he tells her, and kicks his boot-toe against the leg of his desk. “Not much you can do to get the kids back. Think you need to just have a ceremony to let them rest in the Otherworld, you know?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” Jo bemoans softly, then sighs, and thanks him for his help.
“Call me if you need anything, you know, Jo?”
“I know.” And she hangs up without another word.
He ignores the sixth caller then, and starts with the man in Jersey who thinks his daughter is possessed; then the woman in Upstate who’s convinced her house is haunted by Pagan spirits; and then a family living on a commune near Troy that claims strange disappearances from the commune grounds-including one witnessed by five people where the little girl simply vanished into thin air.
The man in Jersey has a gruff voice, but Dean believes him because he can hear the man’s daughter in the background the whole time, snapping and snarling and speaking in an otherworldly tone that sends shivers down Dean’s spine. He promises to see to that as soon as he’s humanly possible of getting down to the man’s home.
The woman in Upstate is a little off her rocker, and doesn’t believe Dean when he says those ‘Pagan spirits’ are the oak trees on her western wall tapping on her attic. He has to hang up on her railing, and half-wonders if he should call the authorities and have her committed.
The family from the commune-or the representative of it; a young man by the sound of the voice, perhaps fourteen-is a genuine concern, and he tells the boy he’s speaking with that as soon as he’s done in New Jersey, he will be out to Troy to see to them. He figures, if he times everything right, he can finish up the Troy business, continue on to Chicago, and then catch a flight from Chicago to Seattle to deal with Jonah.
Life never does seem to slow down.
-----
Her name is Samantha Blackmer, and she is tiny but livid with the demon inside her. Her father is a huge beast of a man, military, exuding something Dean dimly remembers from his childhood that’s like his father’s civil but short attitude with strangers. Dean towers over her, rosary from Pastor Jim in one hand and a book of Latin chants in the other, circling the Trap he has her in as he speaks.
She snarls and swears and lies to him, and he ignores everything, except when she breathes deeply through her nose and laughs loudly and says, “You shouldn’t be using the Lord’s name when you’re going to Hell. Faggot. Letting your cousin fuck you. Wanting all those things. And people think demons are sick.”
Her father stares at him curiously, arms crossed over his chest, from the doorway to the sitting room. Dean chants on, slapping the book shut with the last few words. The blue-black plume of brimstone smoke wreaths up from her mouth and nose on a scream, and when the last of it is gone, banished with a crack back to Hell, she slumps and her father rushes forward to her.
Dean watches out of the corner of his eyes, collecting his things, as her father comforts her. She turns large green eyes on him, flushes red, then looks away; Dean feels his neck heat, but holds himself steady, even as her father turns to him and gruffly pulls his wallet out of his pocket.
“How much?”
Dean tells him the standard fare.
When her father flinches and fumbles with the leather of his wallet, Dean corrects, “Whatever you think is appropriate, sir.”
He hands Dean four hundred dollars, and says, “I’ll wire the rest to you in the City, Mr Winchester.”
“Thank you, Mr Blackmer,” Dean murmurs, then smiles at Samantha. “Hope you feel better, girlie. Make sure I don’t have to see you again, alright?”
“Yessir.”
He leaves them for Troy with the suspicious eyes of a wary father on his back, and has never enjoyed the quiet of his car so much before. In Troy, he has no explanation for the disappearances. The commune thanks him for his help, and he promises to review their case when he returns from Seattle.
Chicago, when he arrives, is snow-white and icy cold. He shivers as he unfolds himself from the front seat of his car in front of an old brownstone apartment complex. Through a third-story window, he spots his mother’s lean body and bright blond hair; he smiles when she disappears from the door, and just leans against the car, warming his hands with his cold-fogging breath.
She’s down soon enough, beaming and waving him toward the warmth of the building. He grabs his bag and hurries up to her, smiling as he bends to hug her.
“Christ Almighty, you got huge,” she breathes, gripping his neck for a second, then sliding her hands down his arms. “Were you this big when you last visited?”
“Yeah, about.” It was only a year, and he’s pretty sure he’s done growing, being twenty-five and all. She beams at him, touching his cheeks reverently, and he allows her, though he’s always hated the way she touched him, looking for John in his face and eyes. He worries when she does that: if she sees his father there, what will she do? More importantly, what will she do the day she can no longer find him inside her son?
“Well, come inside. It’s damn cold out here. I have tea on; Missouri called and told me you were coming.”
They are silent all the way to the apartment, but when they enter the haven beyond the door-it smells sweetly of sandalwood incense and essential oils and kitchen-magic, like the house back in Lawrence always smelled-Mary starts in without prompt about the goings on of the Hunting community as far as she knows. She gleans into family affairs for a moment, primarily concerning the extended family and those she has made into her family (people like Uncle Bobby, and Aunt Ellen and Uncle Bill, and Deacon, and Pastor Jim). When she pauses for a while, he starts in on his latest book-Hoping for Heaven he’s think of calling it, but when he describes the book she tells him that’s a silly name for it-about his work mostly on the East Coast. She asks if he’s settled down with any sweet nice girl and if she can expect grandchildren before she keels over from exhaustion.
He laughs when she asks, and shrugs. “Just haven’t found the right girl.” He can never bring himself to tell her he doesn’t think he will.
They drink tea and eat toasted sandwiches and talk about the weather in Chicago. Mary admits that she’s thinking about pulling up root again.
“Can’t you stay still longer than a couple years?”
“It doesn’t feel right,” she tells him, staring into her mug. “Not since Lawrence.”
“Where this time?”
“I haven’t been to California since I was about twenty. I was thinking about Palo Alto or Altadena or something.”
“Sure, Momma. Okay.”
-----
He wakes after his cellphone has stopped ringing, and holds it to his ear as the nice recorded woman informs him he has one new voicemail.
There is the dull noise of night and a single car driving by, and then a voice he now concretely remembers from his office answering machine, gravelly and worried, saying, “Dean, we need to talk. I’ll try again some other time.”
VII
November, 2004 - Dean
The thing about Dean Winchester’s Private Investigation Firm was that he did not do classic dick-work. After getting out of graduate school with a PhD in both Criminal Justice and Forensics-and a less notable and seemingly useless Bachelors in Differential Mythology and Religion-he had published a strange little book by the name of Ghostwalking which kept him from taking the bar exams due to a belief that he wasn’t psychologically stable. He published three other books, all on similar subjects, and, by the summer of 2003, had made enough money to set up his ‘firm’ all on his own.
The office was very noir: a tiny office over a laundromat in the Bronx, his name leafed onto the fogged-glass door; a desk, and a bookcase, and an open window to the noise of the street that he only closed during the worst part of winter. The people who came to him knew, for the most part, what they were getting in to. Except for his books, he never advertised.
For the most part, he got a lot of crazies coming to his door, trying to pitch their book ideas for him to write. Often enough, he got a real case. He got a majority of disappearances, mostly children or young teenagers. Every once in a while, he had to bring out the heavy artillery: shotguns with rock salt, exorcism rituals, talismans and amulets and Creole hoodoo.
It was nothing like he could remember his mother doing. It wasn’t Hunting-and he knew some Hunters, he found: Pastor Jim, Bobby Singer, the Harvell’s and their daughter Jo-it wasn’t even something the Hunters liked to admit existing. But Dean knew, deep in his heart, that it was the only way he could do something that felt natural, and not have to disappear into the woodwork or hide for the rest of his life.
-----
He marks the important appointments on the calender in his house, and stares at the red circles around the black numberS and his hurried, slanted handwriting, feeling foolish for having marked it there in all permanence. The anniversary of his father’s death sits a few slots down on the calender, also red and ominous, but this circle he’s just drawn seems much more pressing and life-threatening and terrible.
His cellphone jiggles silently in his pocket, and he pulls it out and says only, “Winchester.”
“Well, isn’t that professional. And here I was hoping I’d catch you all off guard and just waking up and stuff.”
Dean chuckles. “You’ve got your time zones messed up again, Jonah. I’m three hours ahead of you in New York.”
“It’s eight in the morning!” Jonah complains.
“Actually, it’s eleven, and I’m just headed in to work.” Dean grabs his jacket as he says it, and asks, “What’s up?” as he struggles one-handed into it.
“Marisol wanted to know if you’re coming to the reunion, blah-blah-blah, Dad’s on a craps shoot about your mom again, yadda yadda-oh, here’s something up your alley! I need you to come out to Seattle for the weekend and check my plumbing or something.”
“I think I saw this porno once,” Dean grumbles. Jonah laughs that disgustingly appetizing laugh of his, and Dean has to pull the phone away from his ear so he doesn’t end up hard for the rest of the day. “Dude, I’m not your plumber.”
“Oh, I don’t need a plumber. I need you to check my pipes, because I’m hoping that that’s what’s making the noise in the apartment.” Jonah chuckles. “It’s starting to freak Michael out.”
Dean takes the stairs down into the semi-warmth of the underground cautiously, counting the steps out of ritual habit as he asks, “What sort of sounds? Tapping? Grinding?”
“A little bit of both. The occasional groan, like the apartment’s settling or something. Some of that crazy-ass rats-in-the-cellar noise.”
Dean does swear, and then says, quite clearly, “I’m not coming out. Call Joanna Harvell, but I don’t deal with that sort of thing. I’m a PI, Jonah, not a fucking medium.”
“C’mon, Dean,” Jonah whines softly, and Dean can almost see it: Jonah leaning against his counter, all long lines, running his free hand through his brown hair and chewing his bottom lip a little. It’s a wet-dream sort of vision, and Dean forces it deep into the shadowy recesses of his mind. Jonah suddenly says, “Well, maybe I just want you to come out then. Even if you’re not going to clean my pipes.”
“I hear that innuendo, and I’m having none of it,” Dean growls, but there is too much affection and arousal in his voice, he knows. He taps a foot on the platform, and says, “I have a couple things I need to straighten out here in New York, and then I have a stop in Chicago. But I’ll put you on the list, okay?”
“I should get the top of the list, Dean,” Jonah says in his best sultry and convincing voice. Dean rolls his eyes, but knows he’s going to have to hide in the train. “You love me the best, after all.”
“Call me if things start moving on their own, I might move you up the list.” And he hangs up and sticks the phone back into his pocket.
The train arrives two minutes late, but Dean doesn’t really mind. It’s the nice thing about working alone and being entirely self-employed: he doesn’t have to answer to anybody, if he doesn’t want to. He settles in a back corner of the second car, pressed against the plastic of the seat and watching the early lunch crowd: a woman listening to music, several college students talking vapidly and with too much movement, an older man and his young son or grandson. There’s a man with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, long legs sprawled out before him, and Dean frowns a little; he can almost put names to faces on his train rides, and this one is someone he’s never seen before. It throws him a little.
He gets off four stops later, says hello to a security guard that hired him on for an investigation in that tunnel a year ago when he was still fresh and practically a no-name, and takes the stairs out of the underground two at a time where the crowd will let him. The Bronx is more busy with lunch than Manhattan had been, and he comes into the press of bodies putting earbuds in and turning up his Walkman so he can just barely hear the thrum of the city.
He stops at a diner on the third corner he passes, orders coffee and a sandwich to go, and flirts shamelessly with the thin-waisted Italiana running the counter. She winks and flirts back, squeezing her breasts between her arms; she never notices that he’s shooting glances at her tall older brother with the tattoo on his neck, and he likes it that way.
It’s another four blocks to the building with his office, but already the sidewalks are thinning of people settling down for lunch, and he gets there just as the clock above his filing cabinet chimes noon. His phone blinks with messages, and he presses the machine to listen to them all.
As always, most of them are crack pots off their medicine again. He deletes twelve of the eighteen messages, then listens to the remaining six again.
The first is from his mother, reminding him that she’s in Chicago, and she’s expecting him to come visit her since he promised he’d come around back in January of 2001 and she hates him living in New York now that everything has happened since September of that year. The fourth is from Pastor Jim with Joanna Harvell’s voice in the background, asking if he’ll be back any time soon because Joanna’s interested in using his investigative techniques for a Hunt of hers; that will be the first call he returns, he knows.
The sixth is an odd little message because most of it is the dull noise of night and a single car driving by, and then a voice he vaguely remembers, gravelly and worried, saying, “Dean. Dean, we need to talk. I’ll try again some other time.”
The other three are clients in and around the City-one from Jersey, but he qualifies that for ‘around the City,’ considering some of his clients have been from Florida or the Midwest. He jots each number into his Rolodex neatly, sits behind his desk with his coffee and sandwich, and dials Pastor Jim.
Joanna picks up on the second ring, and Dean grins when she is very polite on the phone. He leans back in his chair and says, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you be that friendly, Joanna Beth. I think I need to call Aunt Ellen and tell her she finally raised you right when she drove you out on your ass.”
“Dean,” she simpers. “Took you long enough gettin’ back to us.”
“You called late. I leave my office when I’m done with dinner, unless I’ve got somethin’ big to work on.” She chuckles slightly. “What do you want me for, huh? I’ve got about a hundred cases to follow up on, and I’m goin’ to see Momma for the anniversary, and then I’m headed over to Seattle after she’s done with me. When do you need me?”
“Yesterday?”
Dean swears. “Can’t you keep me on as consult? What’s up?”
And she details it in a way that would make any Hunter proud: missing children, all born on or around May first, August twenty-second or March twentieth, all gone on October thirty-first like clockwork. Two of them turned up dead. It was a long-standing situation, but that year had been particularly bad, and the parents were actively seeking aid of anyone who could help.
“It’s Sidhe, Jo,” he tells her, and kicks his boot-toe against the leg of his desk. “Not much you can do to get the kids back. Think you need to just have a ceremony to let them rest in the Otherworld, you know?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” Jo bemoans softly, then sighs, and thanks him for his help.
“Call me if you need anything, you know, Jo?”
“I know.” And she hangs up without another word.
He ignores the sixth caller then, and starts with the man in Jersey who thinks his daughter is possessed; then the woman in Upstate who’s convinced her house is haunted by Pagan spirits; and then a family living on a commune near Troy that claims strange disappearances from the commune grounds-including one witnessed by five people where the little girl simply vanished into thin air.
The man in Jersey has a gruff voice, but Dean believes him because he can hear the man’s daughter in the background the whole time, snapping and snarling and speaking in an otherworldly tone that sends shivers down Dean’s spine. He promises to see to that as soon as he’s humanly possible of getting down to the man’s home.
The woman in Upstate is a little off her rocker, and doesn’t believe Dean when he says those ‘Pagan spirits’ are the oak trees on her western wall tapping on her attic. He has to hang up on her railing, and half-wonders if he should call the authorities and have her committed.
The family from the commune-or the representative of it; a young man by the sound of the voice, perhaps fourteen-is a genuine concern, and he tells the boy he’s speaking with that as soon as he’s done in New Jersey, he will be out to Troy to see to them. He figures, if he times everything right, he can finish up the Troy business, continue on to Chicago, and then catch a flight from Chicago to Seattle to deal with Jonah.
Life never does seem to slow down.
-----
Her name is Samantha Blackmer, and she is tiny but livid with the demon inside her. Her father is a huge beast of a man, military, exuding something Dean dimly remembers from his childhood that’s like his father’s civil but short attitude with strangers. Dean towers over her, rosary from Pastor Jim in one hand and a book of Latin chants in the other, circling the Trap he has her in as he speaks.
She snarls and swears and lies to him, and he ignores everything, except when she breathes deeply through her nose and laughs loudly and says, “You shouldn’t be using the Lord’s name when you’re going to Hell. Faggot. Letting your cousin fuck you. Wanting all those things. And people think demons are sick.”
Her father stares at him curiously, arms crossed over his chest, from the doorway to the sitting room. Dean chants on, slapping the book shut with the last few words. The blue-black plume of brimstone smoke wreaths up from her mouth and nose on a scream, and when the last of it is gone, banished with a crack back to Hell, she slumps and her father rushes forward to her.
Dean watches out of the corner of his eyes, collecting his things, as her father comforts her. She turns large green eyes on him, flushes red, then looks away; Dean feels his neck heat, but holds himself steady, even as her father turns to him and gruffly pulls his wallet out of his pocket.
“How much?”
Dean tells him the standard fare.
When her father flinches and fumbles with the leather of his wallet, Dean corrects, “Whatever you think is appropriate, sir.”
He hands Dean four hundred dollars, and says, “I’ll wire the rest to you in the City, Mr Winchester.”
“Thank you, Mr Blackmer,” Dean murmurs, then smiles at Samantha. “Hope you feel better, girlie. Make sure I don’t have to see you again, alright?”
“Yessir.”
He leaves them for Troy with the suspicious eyes of a wary father on his back, and has never enjoyed the quiet of his car so much before. In Troy, he has no explanation for the disappearances. The commune thanks him for his help, and he promises to review their case when he returns from Seattle.
Chicago, when he arrives, is snow-white and icy cold. He shivers as he unfolds himself from the front seat of his car in front of an old brownstone apartment complex. Through a third-story window, he spots his mother’s lean body and bright blond hair; he smiles when she disappears from the door, and just leans against the car, warming his hands with his cold-fogging breath.
She’s down soon enough, beaming and waving him toward the warmth of the building. He grabs his bag and hurries up to her, smiling as he bends to hug her.
“Christ Almighty, you got huge,” she breathes, gripping his neck for a second, then sliding her hands down his arms. “Were you this big when you last visited?”
“Yeah, about.” It was only a year, and he’s pretty sure he’s done growing, being twenty-five and all. She beams at him, touching his cheeks reverently, and he allows her, though he’s always hated the way she touched him, looking for John in his face and eyes. He worries when she does that: if she sees his father there, what will she do? More importantly, what will she do the day she can no longer find him inside her son?
“Well, come inside. It’s damn cold out here. I have tea on; Missouri called and told me you were coming.”
They are silent all the way to the apartment, but when they enter the haven beyond the door-it smells sweetly of sandalwood incense and essential oils and kitchen-magic, like the house back in Lawrence always smelled-Mary starts in without prompt about the goings on of the Hunting community as far as she knows. She gleans into family affairs for a moment, primarily concerning the extended family and those she has made into her family (people like Uncle Bobby, and Aunt Ellen and Uncle Bill, and Deacon, and Pastor Jim). When she pauses for a while, he starts in on his latest book-Hoping for Heaven he’s think of calling it, but when he describes the book she tells him that’s a silly name for it-about his work mostly on the East Coast. She asks if he’s settled down with any sweet nice girl and if she can expect grandchildren before she keels over from exhaustion.
He laughs when she asks, and shrugs. “Just haven’t found the right girl.” He can never bring himself to tell her he doesn’t think he will.
They drink tea and eat toasted sandwiches and talk about the weather in Chicago. Mary admits that she’s thinking about pulling up root again.
“Can’t you stay still longer than a couple years?”
“It doesn’t feel right,” she tells him, staring into her mug. “Not since Lawrence.”
“Where this time?”
“I haven’t been to California since I was about twenty. I was thinking about Palo Alto or Altadena or something.”
“Sure, Momma. Okay.”
-----
He wakes after his cellphone has stopped ringing, and holds it to his ear as the nice recorded woman informs him he has one new voicemail.
There is the dull noise of night and a single car driving by, and then a voice he now concretely remembers from his office answering machine, gravelly and worried, saying, “Dean, we need to talk. I’ll try again some other time.”