All Present

It is Palm Sunday on Calumet Avenue, six years after the Russells came through the worst of it. Naomi’s garden, planted in the yard where a house once burned, will be dedicated on Easter morning. And Denise Russell has asked every one of them to be at her table that afternoon, no excuses.

Every Easter at dawn, somebody leaves one white flower on her back step. Nobody has ever seen who.

Seven days. A storm off the lake, a train running late out of Mississippi, a phone ringing through forty-one names, and a promise that somebody in this family is keeping from all the rest. Before Sunday dinner, everyone who loves Denise Russell will learn one thing they didn’t know.

Told by twenty-four voices across one Holy Week, All Present is the bonus book of the Brother’s Keeper saga: a Black family novel about five brothers, the women who raised them, and the long table on Calumet Avenue where everybody gets counted. Read the series in order.

Twenty-four voices. One Easter. Every chair filled.