Chapter 17: Something Real

I called Connor's mother from Roz's shop on Wednesday night and said: "I have something real."

She was quiet for a long moment.

"Thursday," she said. "Pippa bakes with me after school. Come to the back door at four. Don't park on Linden."

Abraham parked two streets over and stayed in the truck.

I walked through a neighbor's yard with a pie tin in my hands, so that if anyone looked, I was a woman delivering pie.

Connor's mother opened the kitchen door before I knocked.

She wore an apron over her good blue dress and flour on one wrist.

Pippa stood at the counter with a rolling pin, and she looked at me and then at her grandmother.

"She knows I'm here?" Pippa whispered.

"I know nothing," her grandmother said. "I'm an old woman making a crust. Come into the pantry, both of you."

The pantry smelled of flour and dust, and there was one bare bulb.

She shut the door and sat on the bucket.

I stood against the shelves with Pippa's shoulder against my arm, and Pippa took the pouch from around her neck.

"Grandma," she said. "I have to tell you something, and you can't tell Dad."

"I have repeated everything I heard to him since he was a boy," her grandmother said. "I called it being a good mother."

"Yes."

"I won't now. Say it."

Pippa did.

She said it without a wobble, and at the part about what she'd been told to say about me, her grandmother's hand closed hard on the cane.