Page 23 of Kinsey (Pennington Family #1)

“I hope they all get the clap and die.” He didn’t want that either, he told himself. “Well, you’d think that a one of them would have felt a little sorry for their old man and gotten him a quarter or two in his pot. It would have been a bit to get me some chips.”

He didn’t know why he was so obsessed with chips. He didn’t normally care for snack food. Especially chips. It was the principle of the thing. He deserved them, and they should have wanted him to have them.

“Instead, they have to act like I didn’t have a part in them being alive, like I had nothing to do with it.

” He thought of all the things that he could have gotten if they’d just put a couple of bucks in his pot.

“Like I know what I can buy. I don’t want your money anyway, you little bastards. You’re nothing but little bastards.”

Walton wanted to be pissy with someone, to start a fight with one of the younger bloods that were still in the dining room.

But he didn’t. He wasn’t nearly as stupid as people believed him to be.

Being an old man like he was, there was no way he could match himself up with the kids that were in prison nowadays.

They were not just smarter than him but more than likely knew ways to kill him that wouldn’t require a gun or a knife.

No, he wasn’t going to be messing with them kids out there.

Thinking about how old he was, it took him nearly too long to figure it out, and he lost interest in what he’d been thinking about.

The nearest that he could figure was that he was nearly seventy years old or thereabouts.

He might well have been older, but certainly no younger than that.

It made him sort of sick to his belly when he thought of being ninety years old someday and still being in prison for a crime that had been pushed on him by his wife.

“Damn her. She should have said yes to me.” He tried to remember what he’d wanted her to say yes to, but it was all confusing with the thoughts of how old he was.

Then he thought about how his boys should have done right by him, and they’d not.

“What did we even have them for if they were going to be treating me like this when I needed them most?”

At lights out, he was on his cot but not ready to sleep.

So long as he wasn’t causing any trouble, they didn’t care if he slept or not.

So long as he wasn’t bothering the other inmates, he didn’t have to sleep.

Instead, he decided to write a letter to his boys, at least to the girly-sounding one.

Walton didn’t spell all that well, but he knew what he wanted to say.

He was going to be putting down the law to them, and they’d listen by god. Damned ingrates.

After three hours of just trying to spell the boy’s name, he gave up.

There wasn’t no point in him writing to him if he didn’t know how to spell his name.

In fact, he wondered if any of them knew his name.

That would have been a kicker, them bitching about him not knowing their names when they didn’t even know his.

Getting into his cot, he thought of all the times that he’d been home with the kids and never bothered with them.

“They’re lucky that I didn’t beat them all to death when I had the chance.” He wouldn’t have done that. He never once hit them. Or Martha, for that matter, until that night. “I’m more of a gambling man than a beater. They should have known that about me.”

It did get him to thinking about how much they knew about him.

He’d never been home all that much, and when he was there, he never bothered with any of them.

He’d been looking for his next big stake and how he was going to win all the money in a good game of poker or whatever other card game was going on.

Hell, he would have played Go Fish if there was any money involved.

Now that he thought on it, he really had been in prison or jail more than he’d been at home.

Laughing slightly to himself, he thought that should have made him Father of the Year for them.

He’d never disciplined them, nor had he touched them once in any kind of harmful way.

They should have figured out that he was the best daddy in the world for all that he’d done for them by being in jail all the time.

“Damned ingrates. Didn’t even realize how good they had it made until now.

I should have told them that when I had them on the phone.

Kids? Who needed them.” He fell asleep knowing that he’d been a good dad to his kids, not like some of the others in here.

He’d not tell them that, of course. That was his own good story that he was going to keep for himself.

“Yes, sir. I was the best, and they should have known that.”

~*~

David watched Kinsey sleeping. They said he’d had a rough night with bad dreams. He’d had few himself about the accident and wouldn’t want anyone to know how badly the thing had bothered him. He looked around the room that Kinsey had for himself.

He hadn’t always been a good man, not like he was today.

If it hadn’t been for his wife, he might well have gone on being a bully and a bastard.

But she told him that she’d not marry him if he was going to act like a child without a nap, and that had him changing things around, not at first, of course.

But he’d learned his lesson when he’d ended up on the wrong end of a gun and it had nearly killed him.

David had learned really fast that he was headed down the wrong path in his life, and it would surely get him killed.

“You learn anything from this?” He was lying in a hospital bed with all kinds of tubes coming out of him when he’d been shot three times in his chest. “I won’t be back if you ever pick up a gun or knife again to settle your problems.”

David couldn’t even talk to her; another machine was keeping him alive. Nodding his head once, he hoped that she’d understand that he was going to keep right on being what he was and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. But she misunderstood him.

“Do you have any idea what my dad did to keep you out of prison? He had to call in favors from all over the world so that you could marry me someday. If you still want that?” Again, he nodded, but he was determined not to be a changed man because she wanted him to.

“I won’t put up with you doing things by your own hand anymore, David Winchester.

I’m a good woman, and you’d be better off if you were to do what I tell you and live.

I would have no problem pulling the plug on you the next time. ”

Turns out she’d been asked to do that when he’d been brought in.

The diamond on her finger had given her a lot of rights that week.

One of them being the one who decided if he lived or not.

He was really glad that she’d been in a better mood than she’d been in when he finally woke up. She got right in his face.

“You have one week to get your affairs in order, or I’ll order a hit on you that won’t miss this time.

And if I’m given the chance, I’ll pull that plug and see you dead before I’ll have my name associated with you being a monster.

Do you understand me? I’ll do it too.” He had no doubt that she would, and it frightened him a great deal that she would have him killed by someone better than the man who had tried.

“One week to get your shit together, or I’m going to do it too.

And it won’t matter if I go to jail or not.

My dad has a lot more favors he could pull in for me, and see you six feet under and me living my life without you. ”

After that talk, he never so much as touched a gun, only to have them sold from his house and every one of them out of his house.

He made amends to those that he’d wronged, and there were a lot of them, and spent the next fifty years or so being married to a woman that kept him on the straight and narrow and never once gave him reason to not love her.

When they found out that his youth had cost him the ability to have children, she stayed with him then, too.

David knew that he was a lucky man and knew that for the rest of his life, he’d love the woman who had threatened him with certain death if he didn’t get his shit together.

Now he was looking in on a man that he would have loved to have fathered had he been given the chance.

“What are you doing here? Don’t you have some other farmer that you could pester?” He told Kinsey that he didn’t, he’d had enough of that for one lifetime. “Good. You’re kind of growing on me, and I like having you around.”

“I’ve been wondering when you’re going to get to go home.

” Kinsey laughed a little and stopped when the pain got to him.

The boy was in a great deal of pain, and the contusion from his armpit to his hip bone was testament to how much he’d done to save himself and his brother.

“There are some things that I wanted to talk to you about now that you’re going to be all right for the next fifty years. ”

“They said that I could possibly go home on Tuesday. I just have to be able to move a bit better. My leg is giving me the most pain. They said that my ankle was turned up under the clutch, and it bruised it all the way to the bone.” He said that they’d told him he was lucky that he’d not broken his ankle.

“I think I’m lucky on a lot of fronts about that accident.

More than I would have ever thought when I was sitting in the truck with the police all around. ”