Ellen dialed her daughter's cell number from memory, trying to ignore the way Bobby's kitchen phone felt different and unlike the old phone at the Roadhouse, tried not to think of the Roadhouse right now... tried to just work at making sure she was sounded calm when it came time to talk. She was anything but calm, she was overwhelmed and her whole life had been turned upside down and she had to be strong for Jo. For Dean. They needed her. They would need her to be strong, so she would be. Simple as that.

It rang four times and she prepared herself to leave a message, though she had no clue what that message would be. Or if it would even be a good idea to include call me when you get this in the message. No, she definitely wouldn't. It was better for her to be the one to call back, as was looking likely. She honestly had no idea what the message was going to wind up being, had no script at all.

She would just... wing it (and be strong, always be strong) and oh god that reminded her so much of Bill. Wing it.

"If worse comes to worse, we'll just wing it. We're good at that."

No, Bill was good at that. Jo was good at that.

Ellen was...

"—mom?"

The phone was answered on the very last ring. The younger voice on the other end was trying to sound cool and unaffected, but there was an audible, tell-tale note of worry. Normally Jo was quick and efficient with answering her phone. All throughout her life, she'd only ever experienced significant calls — no idle girlish chatter, no classmates talking about homework, no friends asking her to sleepovers. Jo's phone was the be-all end-all of communication and, honestly, she'd been waiting for this call for a week, fidgety and anxious.

Which made her all the more hesitant to pick it up when it finally came. She was ready to be crisp and curt, to say things like You missed his anniversary. You missed it.— though the truth was that Jo herself had been the one to miss it. She'd avoided home, she hadn't returned to the roadhouse, and she had not called her own mother. She was so used to Ellen doing the calling.

"Yeah, baby, it's me."

It would be the fact that she'd called Jo baby that would give away the stress she'd been under this past week, because baby was reserved for special occasions. Under normal circumstances, the terms of endearment Ellen used most were honey or sweetie and she used them with everyone under a certain age, not just Jo. But baby? Jo was the only one she called baby, and she hadn't called her daughter that since Jo was a child unless it was a something had happened where she needed to, for herself. 

Hearing the name startled Jo, which made her even tetchier and sent her further on edge; but she knew this was a bad week. May was always bad for the Harvelles. It could've just been the anniversary. Typical blithe naïvité had Jo hoping that that was the only topic of choice for the day, and that this wouldn't end up in another tired old argument telling her to come home.

"You never take this long to call," she said. She was trying not to sound accusatory. It didn't quite work.  "And I don't believe you forgot, so what's going on?"

Without noticing it herself, Jo had started pacing while talking.

"I'm sorry, baby," That right there? That was guaranteed to set off the alarm bells in her daughter's brain, because Ellen had combined the two sentiments, something she rarely did. And it was more than an apology for the missed anniversary, but for everything, for all the heartbreak, she was about to impart. "It's gone. I'm so sorry,"

Jo's pulse ran cold at her mother's words; but most of all, there was confusion there, and worried anticipation.

"What's gone?"

"The Roadhouse. It burned to the ground last week. Same day your Daddy..." Ellen couldn't help the fact that her voice shook at that, damnit.  The Roadhouse had been her life for nearly three decades, and to lose it like that, on the same day she lost her husband, was an almost crushing blow.

There was a long pause, before a very small voice replied, sounding even softer and thinner and younger across the phone line. Jo stated the impossible, out of stunned disbelief. "... You're kidding."

"It was a demon. Ash'd stumbled onto somethin' big, and... we were out of pretzels."

There was so more to it than that, but guilt left the words stuck in Ellen's throat and she couldn't. She was still stuck on the fucking pretzels.

Ellen's daughter sat down, but more out of a complete inability to remain standing than anything else. Her legs crumpled, and she settled down into the nearest wooden chair. Her room in Duluth was empty. Quiet. Lonely. She hadn't noticed how far she'd come from the buzz of voices and the clink of glasses and the muted bass throb of music at the roadhouse. Hadn't noticed. Until now. Until everything she'd been running away from was gone.

"Ash stumbled onto... christ, mom, is he okay? What'd he find? Are you okay?" The frantic questions were slipping out now, and betraying that tell-tale note of panic in her voice.

"I'm fine. I was getting pretzels," her mother answered the first question last, because it was easiest and gave her time to work around the guilt that was making her throat close up. She should have sent Ash, rather than gone herself. If she'd sent Ash, he'd be here, he'd be able to help Dean and Bobby better.... he'd be alive.  Ellen did her best keep that guilt over that out of her voice, but probably didn't succeed.
  
She hoped. Oh, God, she hoped.

Her nails dug into the cold plastic of the phone, and something in Jo's breath hitched. There was the sound of strangled pain there, and still more disbelief; because this was May, this was already bad enough, she'd seen her mother quietly snap open the whiskey bottle and stalk off into the back room far too many times for her liking this year. Except there was no more back room of the roadhouse, no more rum-stained counters and aged ceiling beams. Her home was gone, and her closest thing to a brother was gone...

"Mom."

"That was a week ago. I'm at Uncle Bobby's now. He and Dean are making sense of what Ash found now."

Ellen desperately wanted to do something to ease the anguish in her daughter's voice, but she couldn't.

"Mom, I have to come home."  There was a strange sort of detached determination in that sentence. She didn't exactly say 'So I can see it for myself,' but the message was certainly implied.  "You guys can't -- I mean, what if it --"

What if it comes back?

"No."

"I can't stay here!"

"Yes, Joanna Beth, you can and you will," there was a slightly hysterical edge to Ellen's insistence on the matter, like her tight self-control she'd kept up for a week was beginning to fray.

"Why won't you let me come home?"

Every time Jo got upset, that stubborn and almost child-like twang to her voice came out: that anguished insistence that the world had twisted itself wrong in her eyes. The only difference now was that Jo was arguing to come back to Nebraska, not to leave it. And she wasn't a naive, idealistic hunter wanting to follow in her daddy's footsteps; she was a daughter in pain wanting to return and be with the only family she had left.

"I'm leaving Duluth, I'll quit that stupid job, I can go to Bobby's, maybe I can help you guys with figuring out Ash's research... he, he taught me loads..."

Bad idea. When she tried to tiptoe her way around the topic of Ash, Jo finally crumpled, curling up into a ball in her chair.

"Because I can't lose you too," her mother's ragged confession overrode whatever else Jo said after her question about why she couldn't come home, both in volume and emotion. "Ash and Sam... I can't, Jo. You have to stay in Duluth."

There was a long pause. If it weren't for the slight crackle of static on the line, one might have thought that Jo's phone had disconnected.

Before, finally: "... Sam?"

When Ellen sucked in a breath and began the story, it was very jumbled and halting at points:

"He was taken, by the demon. Bobby and Dean were looking for him when Ash... they found him in Cold Oaks. Bobby thinks it was some kind of psychic competition. Sam, he... he wouldn't do it. He tried to convince the other boy that they could fight it, fight the demon. At least, that's what we think. They fought and the other boy got the upper hand because Sam wouldn't... Sam didn't.... it would have been almost instantaneous, the way it happened."

Typical of Ellen, to still refer to them as boys -- as if it was all one playful wrestling match in the schoolyard gone horribly wrong. And it was odd, but after her mother's words sank in, Jo's first thoughts did not flit to the quiet man who was so close in age to her, the one with the laptop, who smiled and obeyed and was even possessed into torturing her once upon a time. It was the other one. The one who grinned when Sam was around, who followed his brother anywhere, who--

Oh christ. Oh, christ.

Jo scrubbed at her face with her free hand, skimming away tears from her cheeks. This just made it worse. She needed to come back she needed to see him she needed to check if this was true -- oh god, how was Dean coping? They were even closer than she was to Ash--

"I'm packing and I'm coming," was all Jo could say.

"I told you no, Joanna."

Why yes, Ellen felt no compunctions about treating her daughter like a child. Especially not at this moment. Not when so much was at stake, not when she couldn't afford to have Jo at stake too. Not that she ever could, but especially not now.

"Who's saying I'm safer all the way out here by myself?" she broke in. "If I came back, I'd be with you, and Dean, and Uncle Bobby, and..."

Jo fell silent. She didn't know who was still alive.

"Baby, please..." her mother was very nearly begging now. "Stay there."

She hated hearing her mother like this.

So she caved. Head in hands, elbows propped up on the table in front of her, Jo finally mumbled, "Sure. Fine. Okay. I will." And as far as the younger Harvelle was concerned, this was the truth. In this very minute, she intended to stay in Duluth to keep her mother from worrying.

But the next few hours would be devoted to thinking over her options, and considering making her promise into a lie. Jo could speed back home, and damn the consequences. She couldn't stay here and not know, and not be a part of it.

"Thank you," her mother said. That was all Jo got before Bobby came into the kitchen, prompting Ellen to set the phone down to talk. This left Jo with a muffled and slightly distant insight into the conversation, if she was paying close attention to try and listen, which she no doubt was.

Most of the conversation would be lost, but some mentions of Southern Wyoming, Samuel Colt, and half of Bobby's explanation of "keeping something in". And she definitely would have heard her mother's sharp reprimand of,

"Dean Winchester, where the hell do you think you're going? We're not going into this half-cocked, do you hear me?"

followed by Dean's, "He killed my brother. There's no we in that."

"And if he's been asked to do what we think, then this is bigger than all of us," her mother again, in unison with Bobby's equally firm, "There's no way you're doing this alone."

"Fine. Let's go."

That, from Dean before Ellen picked up again, sounding rushed:

"I gotta go, baby. Uncle Bobby and Dean and I... we have to go. Something big is going down and we have to... I love you. I'll call you. Stay safe."

The small snippets of conversation from the other line were creating more questions in Jo Harvelle's mind than answers. And if there was one thing that kept the young woman moving, it was painfully gnawing curiosity. So when she said goodbye to Ellen, it was with lips pressed into a thin line and the words grating.

"Stay safe. Okay. I will. Love you, mom."

... Safe. Yeah. Christ, she hated lying to her mother.

The only response Jo would be met with was a dial tone followed soon after.