Henry sat on the front steps and waited.
Mom and Dad had been gone since morning. Grandma kept saying, "They're coming, they're coming!" and clapping her hands together like it was somebody's birthday.
But it wasn't anybody's birthday.
Well. Actually. It was.
A car pulled into the driveway. Dad got out first. He was smiling so big it looked like his face might fall off. Then Mom got out, slow and careful, holding a bundle of blankets.
"Henry!" Dad called. "Come meet your sister!"
Henry walked over. He looked at the blankets.
Inside was a very small, very red, very wrinkly face. Her eyes were shut. Her mouth was doing something, like she was chewing on invisible toast.
"This is Lily," Mom whispered.
Henry looked at Lily.
He waited to feel something.
He didn't feel anything.
"Isn't she beautiful?" Grandma said.
Henry thought she looked like a potato. An angry potato. But he didn't say that.
He said, "Okay."
Inside, everything was different. There was a whole new chair in the living room that rocked back and forth. There were tiny diapers stacked in a tower on the kitchen table. There was a smell he didn't know — warm and powdery and strange.
Mom sat in the rocking chair and held Lily against her chest. Dad sat on the arm of the chair. Grandma leaned over all of them, making sounds like a bird.
Henry stood in the doorway.
He went to his room.
He got his big red fire truck — the one with the ladder that really spun. He set it on his bed. He spun the ladder. He spun it again.
The ladder broke off in his hand.
Henry looked at the ladder. He looked at the truck. The truck looked wrong now, like a mouth with a missing tooth.
He put both pieces under his pillow and lay down on top of them.
It got dark. Henry could hear Lily crying from the other room. She cried and cried and then stopped. Then started again.
He pulled the pillow over his ears.
After a while, the house got quiet.
Then his door opened. Just a crack. A triangle of light stretched across his floor.
"Henry?" Mom's voice. Tired. Soft. "You awake?"
"Yes."
Mom came in and sat on the edge of his bed. She didn't say anything for a minute. She just put her hand on his back, and her hand was warm, and it went in circles, slow circles, the way it always did.
"I missed you today," she said.
Henry felt something move inside his chest. Like a bubble that had been stuck.
"My fire truck broke," he said.
Mom picked up the two pieces from under his pillow. She turned them over in her hands.
"I bet Dad can fix this," she said. "He's good at that."
She set the pieces on his nightstand, side by side, like they were waiting to be whole again.
"Mom?"
"Yeah?"
"Does Lily do anything?"
Mom laughed. A real laugh. Her shoulders shook.
"Not yet," she said. "Mostly she just sleeps and cries and eats. That's all babies do."
"That's boring," Henry said.
"So boring," Mom agreed.
Henry smiled. Just a little.
"Will you stay for a minute?" he asked.
"I'll stay for a hundred minutes," Mom said.
She lay down next to him. The bed creaked. Her hair smelled like the same Mom hair it always smelled like, underneath that new powdery smell.
From down the hall, Lily made a sound. Not crying. More like a little hum. A tiny motor running in the dark.
Henry listened.
Mom's hand went in circles on his back.
He reached over to his nightstand and put the fire truck and the ladder together, holding them so they fit just right, the broken edge pressed against the broken edge.
He held them like that for a long time.
And somewhere in the holding, his eyes closed.
