Dream Keeper (Dream Team 4)

It was clean and tidy and serene and feminine, but it still had character, was warm and welcoming.

I loved coming home.

I loved cleaning our home.

I loved cooking in our kitchen or lazing on that pink couch and bingeing TV.

I did not love my doorbell ringing incessantly.

Dammit.

She’d seen me arrive, she was my sister, and it was uncool to avoid her.

Considering why she was probably there (to ask me to church, demand I go to church, or a prayer meeting, or a sit-down with their creepy-ass pastor, or some combo or variation of the above, all of which I had, for an entire decade now, in a variety of ways from kind and gentle to impatient and curt, refused to do), it was uncool of her not to avoid me, that was true.

But I tried in any situation to be the least uncool one.

On a deep exhalation of breath, I walked to the hall that was flanked on the right side with a set of stairs and fed into the aforementioned entryway, which was actually quite large and grand, considering the entirety of the townhouse was less than two thousand square feet.

Off one side was a hall closet, a powder room, and to the other side, a small office that I had set up as a dual zone. One supremely girlie desk where Juno could do classwork or crafts or play on her purple laptop or whatever floated her boat. One slightly less girlie desk where I could pay bills and write letters and online shop.

Tech wasn’t allowed anywhere else in the house.

Outside the office, we spent time together or with books, magazines, television, crafts or our own thoughts.

That was the only way I was a hard-ass mom.

But no way in hell was my kid going to get beaten down by social media or lose half her time to YouTube when there was so much more life had to offer.

Like living it.

Fortunately, she was still a little too young to care about this.

But I had to get that seed planted now and gird my loins because it was coming, I knew it.

I pulled open the door, and unfortunately for my sister, Saffron, when I did, I was raring to go.

It didn’t help that she was wearing a crewneck sweater, a corduroy blazer over that, a scarf not wrapped jauntily around her neck, but instead wrapped to hide the skin there and a wool A-line skirt that fell precisely two inches below her knee. However, no skin showed there either because she had on low-heeled boots. She also wore no makeup and her hair was pulled back in a knot at the base of her skull.

If I didn’t know her, I would expect her to try to hand me a pamphlet and ask me about my relationship with God.

Even though I knew her, it would not surprise me if she handed me a pamphlet and requested we talk about my relationship with God.

In fact, my guess was, she was there, without the pamphlet, but in her church-girl getup, ready to talk to me about my relationship with God.

“Saffron, I cannot do this now,” I snapped.

“Mom has cancer.”

And yet another time that day I was stunned immobile. But this time, it felt like my insides were shrinking.

“What?” I whispered.

“She has cancer and it’s not good. The family needs you, Pepper.”

I shook my head slowly.

She misunderstood my headshake, which was all about the fact that I could not process that my mother had cancer and it was “not good.”

“No, really,” she went on. “We need you.”

“I…I…what kind of cancer?” I asked.

“Breast, but it’s moved to the lymph nodes.”

Oh God.

Lymph nodes were bad. Everyone knew that.

I stepped out of the way, arcing an arm down low in front of me to invite her in.

She came in but didn’t move any farther than the entryway, her usual MO, for, my guess, she feared beyond that she felt she would be tainted by my den of iniquity.

I closed the door and turned to her. “I can’t believe this.”

“I couldn’t either. But it’s true.”

“I…my God.” I pulled myself together. “Okay. What do you need? More, what does Mom need? Do you want to come and sit down? I can make us some coffee.”

“Pepper, you shouldn’t use the Lord’s name like that. And the Lord frowns on drugs and you know caffeine is a drug.”

I closed my mouth.

“And really,” she carried on, “you need to be careful about that. All of that. We need you pure for the prayer circles.”

Uh-oh.

“The prayer circles?”

She nodded. “We also need to find Birch. Immediately. Have you heard from him?” she continued.

Birch was our older brother and I had not heard from him in years.

Neither had anyone else.

“No, I haven’t, Saffron. Listen—”

“We have to find him. As soon as possible. The full family has to be there to complete the circle.”