Something has shifted in the house.
Not the furniture. Not the layout. The air itself, maybe — the way it sits different in the kitchen when Gemma's on the other side of the wall, the way I pour two cups of coffee now without thinking, the way the morning feels less like a thing I need to get through and more like a thing I want to stay in for a while.
This is new. New and inconveniently hard to catalog.
I'm at the stove when the front door flies open hard enough to rattle the coat hooks, and six pounds of dinosaur backpack comes skidding across the entryway hardwood, followed immediately by Ivy.
"Daddy." She drops the backpack with the enthusiasm of someone who has just walked off a very long flight and points directly at me. "We need to talk."
I set down the spatula. "Good morning to you too."
"Gemma's here," she announces. Not a question.
"She's all yours!" Vanessa calls through the open door, already halfway down the porch steps and very pointedly not making eye contact with me. She gives a small wave that meansyou're on your own with this oneand retreats toward her rental car. My ex-wife has excellent survival instincts.
"Gemma's car is right there," Ivy says, gesturing broadly toward the driveway. "Her Honda. With the crack in the bumper."
"Good morning," I say again.
Ivy drops into the nearest kitchen chair and stares at me with the focused gravity of a detective who has cracked the case and is now awaiting a confession. She's got Vanessa's eyes and my stubbornness, which is a combination that occasionally makes me question my life choices.
"I told you," she says.
"You told me what, exactly?"
"That she was nice." She pulls Dino — her latest stuffed addition, a brachiosaurus the size of a throw pillow — from the depths of her backpack and sets him on the table like she's establishing territory. "I told you she was very nice and you should be her friend. And now she lives here."
"She lives next door. In the in-law suite."
Ivy gives this distinction all the serious consideration it deserves, which is none. "She eats breakfast here, though."
"Sometimes."
"Is she going to eat breakfast here today?"
I turn back to the eggs. "Probably."
Ivy nods with the grim satisfaction of someone who has been proven correct and intends to collect on it for the foreseeable future. She arranges Dino carefully at the corner of the table, adjusting his angle twice, and then goes very still.
Clarence has materialized in the kitchen doorway.
He surveys the situation from the threshold with the expression of a creature who has seen a great many things in his life and is prepared to tolerate exactly none of them. His gaze moves from Ivy to Dino and back to Ivy. His tail swishes once.
"Clarence," Ivy says formally. "This is Dino." She rotates the brachiosaurus to face the cat. "You're in charge of him while I'm at school."
Clarence stares at Dino.
Dino stares back, wide-eyed and glassy, with the eternal optimism of a stuffed animal.
Clarence turns around and walks back out of the kitchen.
"He's processing it," Ivy tells me.
"Definitely," I agree.
Gemma appears nearly an hour later, hair still damp from the shower, wearing a flannel that has a small paint stain on the cuff from where she helped Ivy with a papier-mâché volcano a few weeks back. She stops in the kitchen doorway, clocks Ivy at the table, and her whole face goes bright in a way that does something unhelpful to my chest.
"You're back!" she says.
