Dream Keeper (Dream Team 4)

“Baby,” he murmured.

As lovely as his sympathy was, in that moment, I didn’t need it.

I needed him to understand.

“And maybe that’s why I make certain that everywhere Juno turns, she sees I love her. She sees how much that is. Having her space in our office. Me getting up in the mornings to make her breakfast. Whatever,” I told him.

“Or maybe it’s just the woman you are. The mom you are,” he suggested.

“Maybe,” I acknowledged. “But I know Mom loves me. My father is…I don’t know. Misguided. Though I think the truth of it is that he’s just a follower. He seems very strong in his convictions, but he’s not the one who creates those convictions. Someone else is telling him what to think. And he doesn’t question it. He doesn’t do the research. Ruminate on it and consider how it fits in with the world, his viewpoint of that world, his family, his life. He’s told what to think and he thinks that. Before the church, when I was really young, we were a different family. They had a lot of friends. A lot of parties. Looking back, I realize there were drugs around. Pot. Some hallucinogens. Booze. Music. I was young, but even so, I think Mom and Dad had an open marriage back then, though they were definitely committed to each other. But they were happy. We were happy. We were a family. He loved me then.”

Auggie said nothing, but he didn’t take his eyes from me.

“He loved me until he was told I wasn’t worthy of his love.”

He said something then.

“Pepper, sweetheart.”

I shook my head. “It’s okay, Aug. Really. Truly. It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve come to terms with it. I had no choice. I made some extreme decisions in order to break free. To erase them from my life in a certain way. Build the family I didn’t have. I found Corbin. Fell in love with a liar. Got pregnant really fast and too young. All because I yearned for what I didn’t have. But being pregnant,” I smiled, “meeting Juno for the first time, all gunky and making faces that said, ‘What the fuck is this? Put me back.’”

Auggie smiled at that.

I kept talking.

“Her on my chest, squirming, I realized I had to stop messing around. This was real. This wasn’t just about me. She was there too. And back then, Corbin. And then he did what he did, and once I got over the sting of betrayal, I took time with it. With the decisions I’d made. What I’d done. Bringing Juno into this world without really knowing the man who was her father. Without even knowing myself. And I realized it really wasn’t about me. It wasn’t even just about Juno. It was that I was part of a much bigger world and my footprint in that couldn’t be a shitty one. I had to look after those around me. I had to be a good person. For me. For Juno. For everyone.”

“Is that why you didn’t cut your family out of your life?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “I didn’t cut them out of my life because they might not love me in a healthy way, or they might not love me at all anymore. But I love them.”

At these words, he pushed up, turning to me, bending a knee to sit half-cross-legged, his other foot he put in the bed by my hip, knee cocked. He rested his upper body weight in one hand on the bed, the other he reached out and took one of mine, fiddling with my fingers.

All this so he was touching me, even semi-surrounding me.

I had all his attention.

His closeness.

Him.

God, Auggie.

“Which brings me to this, honey,” I kept on. “Do you love them? Is that why you don’t cut them out of your life?”

“For the most part, it’s because I don’t give up,” he informed me.

I shook my head. “Sorry? I don’t know what you mean.”

“When I ended things with Marie, this was the only time she got frustrated and even pissed, after she did what she did, and my response was to make us over. She threw in my face that I never gave up on anything, ‘Including those wastes of space that are your parents,’ her words. But she’d fucked up once, and I was giving up on her.”

“She wasn’t in the place where she could judge you for that,” I pointed out.

“I know that, but she didn’t want us to end. She didn’t want to live with the consequences of what she’d done. She was desperate by then.”

“Okay, I hear all that, but I still don’t know what you mean when you say you don’t give up on your parents.”

“Strip all that shit, mostly her, that ‘her’ being Mom, my dad’s a decent guy.”