Beck looks at me over her head. I press my lips together and study the ceiling with enormous interest.
"Pick six," he says.
"SIX?"
"Six."
"That's barely a herd."
"Six dinosaurs, Ivy."
She climbs out of the suitcase and sits back on her heels, holding each dinosaur up one at a time with the focus of a defense attorney presenting evidence. The brachiosaurus cannot be left behind because he's the tallest and therefore responsible for supervision. The stegosaurus is non-negotiable — she's had him since she was small and he was there when her first tooth fell out. The triceratops is her emotional support dinosaur, which is a designation I didn't know existed until this moment. The T-Rex is self-explanatory. The ankylosaurus is new and still learning the group dynamic, so abandoning him now would be socially damaging.
"That's five," Beck says.
"I know." She holds up a pterodactyl. "His name is Henry."
Henry goes in the bag.
The shirts go in around the edges. Two pairs of pants. One dress that Ivy negotiates back out because it takes up stegosaurus space, a compromise that somehow ends with Beck folding it into a square small enough to qualify as origami. He does it without comment, tucking it between Henry and the brachiosaurus with the same focused efficiency he applies to everything.
On the front porch, Ivy crouches down to Clarence's level and holds the stegosaurus up so he can examine it. "He's coming back," she tells him. "You're in charge while I'm gone." She waits. Clarence blinks at her, then begins cleaning his ear. Ivy nods, satisfied. "Good talk."
Then she stands up, turns to face the street, draws a breath that fills her entire small chest, and announces to everyone within a three-block radius: "I'M GOING TO DISNEYLAND AND I'LL BE BACK AND EVERYTHING BETTER BE THE SAME!"
Beck pinches the bridge of his nose. I turn away before he can catch me laughing.
Vanessa's car pulls up before I've fully recovered. She steps out and hugs Ivy without hesitation, then looks straight at me over Ivy's head and smiles — not the careful smile people aim at the woman standing on their ex-husband's porch, just a real one. "Thanks for being here for this. She's been excited."
"Couldn't miss it," I say.
It's true. I don't know when that became true, but it is.
Beck loads the suitcase into the car. He crouches to Ivy's level, and whatever he says to her is too quiet to hear from where I'm standing — but Ivy wraps both arms around his neck and holds on for a long moment before she lets go and climbs into the back seat. He closes the door, walks back to where I'm standing on the porch steps, and the window comes down immediately.
"GEMMA! MAKE SURE CLARENCE DOESN'T START ANY DRAMA WHILE I'M GONE."
"I'll do my best," I call back.
"He WILL if you don't watch him, and HE KNOWS YOU'RE SOFT ON HIM!"
The car backs down the driveway and disappears around the corner. The street settles. A dog barks once somewhere down the block and then goes quiet.
The house behind us is very still.
Quiet here sounds different without anyone to fill it.
Not bad different. Just different. Cleaner, maybe. Like a room after the furniture's been rearranged and you don't know yet whether you like it better this way.
Beck makes coffee. I bring out blankets because the evenings here have a bite that city living didn't prepare me for, and weend up on the back porch in the last of the evening light with our mugs and Clarence arranged on the railing like an ornament.
"So," I say. "You think he'll start drama?"
"He knocked a plant off Mrs. Delgado's porch last spring," Beck says. "She told me the first week we moved in. Said he looked directly at her while he did it."
"That's premeditated."
"That's Clarence."
