A book arced through the doorway between the bedroom and the living room, aimed vaguely at John’s stomach. From inside the bedroom where she was brushing her hair back away from her temples into a half up style Mary made a face at herself in the mirror but managed to control her laughter, not wanting to lose her grip on her hairbrush and tangle her hair again.
“Did you say something dear?” she asked, voice perfectly innocent as if the book had decided to become a projectile of its own volition. Then she noticed another tangle near the bottom of her hair and sighed as she brought the brush up to combat it. Now I understand why all of the older mothers had their hair cut into those awful bobs she decided as she secured the hair she’d pulled back with an elastic, though I’m not the age for one yet and they’re out of style any way.
But aging wasn’t exactly the best topic for tonight. Date night. She’d had a book on keeping a healthy marriage, had kept it on the shelf next to What to Expect When You’re Expecting that had advised a regular date night, especially after the kids were born. John had smiled at her little library but she hadn’t felt secure without it back then, had no idea how a marriage worked when you didn’t have cleaning weapons and hunting wendigos to make communicating well a matter of life and death.
Now, years later but impossibly as if no time had passed at all, the one thing Mary wasn’t worried about was her marriage. When you died it tended to make things very clear. John and her children were the thing she wasn’t willing to lose. The rest of things she’d wanted, a normal life, stability, all of it, would just have to revolve around them.
Which was all rather grim, especially when she was finally ready to go out on a date that, in some ways, she’d been waiting over twenty years for. She smiled at herself in the mirror and stepped out into the living room her jeans and grin making her look, for a moment, all of nineteen again practically bounding out of her parents’ house to meet John at his car since her father would have thrown a fit if he’d come to the door. The thing about being twenty-nine and having a husband, however, was that she felt perfectly free to reach out and flick the collar on his shirt, not overly fancy for a diner but obviously picked out with thought, and say “Pretty snazzy Winchester.”