Mackenzie snapped. “You’re messing it up.” Frowning, she leaned over to protect her precious handiwork from her sister’s messy fingers.“But I wanna help,” Anna insisted, bending her legs into an awkward squat in an attempt to get down far enough to see what Mackenzie was hiding from her.“You don’t know how to do it right. You can pick some more dandelions, if you want to help.” She straightened up again, keeping a wary eye on her little sister. Then she started to sort through the piles of bright yellow dandelions that Anna had spent the last fifteen minutes collecting for her.Erin and the girls were lying out on a blanket in the wide expanse of grass beside the house she’d grown up in. Erin was reading, and the girls had been drawing in new sketch books with colored pencils, which their grandfather had bought them yesterday. But, a half-hour ago, Mackenzie had started idly braiding and weaving together the stems of a few dandelions. Becoming absorbed in this new project, she’d kept it up until she had a nice-sized mat of flowers and stems now.
